


Stay His Hand

by SeedsOfWinter



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Changing Pronouns for Crowley (Good Omens), Crowley (Good Omens) has ADHD, Crowley you poor sweet PTSD baby, Depression, Episode: s01e01 In the Beginning, Episode: s01e03 Hard Times, Episode: s01e04 Saturday Morning Funtime, Episode: s01e06 The Very Last Day of the Rest of Their Lives, Holy Water, Kissing, M/M, Nonbinary Crowley (Good Omens), Post-Bus Ride (Good Omens), Post-Scene: The Bandstand (Good Omens), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Quote: You go too fast for me Crowley (Good Omens), Sad Crowley (Good Omens), Scene: St James's Park 1862 (Good Omens), Scene: Street Apology (Good Omens), Scene: The Bandstand (Good Omens), Self-Hatred, Self-Worth Issues, Smoking, Suicidal Thoughts, The Night At Crowley's Flat (Good Omens), Thinking way too much about every little thing, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, breaking up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2020-06-24 15:47:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 27,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19726762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeedsOfWinter/pseuds/SeedsOfWinter
Summary: Crowley doesn't know Aziraphale's holy water was made with the best of intentions and the purest of love.Over the years, the angel's prayer proves vital: "If nothing else God, I ask that if he makes to use this on himself, to destroy his own existence, please... please stay his hand."------[This is a response fic to N0nb1narydemon's fic HOLY WATER. I highly recommend you read that one-shot, but this can be read on its own.]





	1. Brewer Street, 1967

**Author's Note:**

  * For [N0nb1narydemon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/N0nb1narydemon/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Holy Water](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19468345) by [N0nb1narydemon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/N0nb1narydemon/pseuds/N0nb1narydemon). 



There were an infinite number of places that the demon Crowley could have set out to run a heist. But he had chosen Soho.

His motivation was partly one of practicality: after seeing an unguarded fount of holy water, it had taken him two decades to recollect his thoughts enough to make a retrieval plan; moving said plan outside of England seemed a fair way to grow distracted for yet another two. Crowley had very much enjoyed  _ Ocean’s 11 _ , and it thrilled him to play out the Sinatra part. If he kept the operation in London, it would be over with quick enough. He already knew which strip clubs and bars attracted the appropriate rapscallions, so why mess with good intel?

His second motivation was purely personal: secretly, buried so deeply that even Crowley wasn’t sure if it was real or a shadow in the corners of his amber eyes, he hoped that  _ Aziraphale  _ would hear about him. And come to say hello.

It had been a minute since they’d last seen each other. After the Blitz miracles, Aziraphale had made his interest in Crowley’s company more plain. At least, Crowley felt that he had. There was always some perfectly innocent reason for the angel to ring him up for a stroll. The nineteen-fifties had been an interesting time in both of their lives, if the regularity with which they’d met was any indication. A lot to talk about apparently. Even more to drink about.

Lately, through whichever crises of faith kept calling his angelic attention, Aziraphale hadn’t had as much time for their previously increasingly common rendezvous. And Crowley missed it. Missed  _ him _ . No matter how interesting the humans had become, temptations and distractions were nothing compared to the deep sense of…  _ contentment _ he felt spending a day with Aziraphale.

It had all started to feel like the best of the old times, the after-Paris but before-Crowley-cocked-it-all-up times. Granted, a lot of the distance between them was on him: he could have made an effort to reach out but his angel’s rejection that sunny morning in St. James Park stung bitterly. Sleeping for a few decades seemed a fantastic idea. But then Crowley had been so shattered, she’d barely managed to crawl out of bed in time for the twenties. She had started thinking it’d been for the best she was gone as long as she had been and wouldn’t it be better for everyone if she made a habit of it--until the demon’s time with British counter-intelligence revealed just how adept Aziraphale was at finding trouble when there were gormless murderers and spies running around the country. He’d been liable to get himself killed, playing with fire like that.

Discorporation was a nasty business. And who was to say those blighters Upstairs wouldn’t reassign him, just ‘cause? Gabriel had tried to do it before! Oh, Aziraphale would have withered away working back at Home Office. No bookshop, no tea, no fun at all. And then where would Crowley be? Bored. Alone. Without a friend in the world.

Nope. Not one drop of good would have come of it. He couldn’t risk losing Aziraphale. After all, they’d only just had the Arrangement for a few hundred years! He’d decided it was better to keep tabs on the angel and get back to preparing for the worst. He worked extensively on his impression of a demon who  _ wasn’t  _ a spring-coiled anxious mess, and who  _ definitely  _ didn’t always want to be near his kindhearted friend. Couldn’t go about drawing the wrong kind of attention.

Speaking of attention though…

Crowley hadn’t been fully expecting Aziraphale to hear about the heist, but he had mentally prepared for it. Somewhat. As the demon had plotted away in his newly rented flat in Mayfair, he’d amused himself by imagining the angel all aghast, telling him,  _ You can’t steal from a  _ church _ , Crowley! _ How he’d chuckled to think about that! Stealing from churches was just the type of grade-a villainy a demon could get commendations over, holy water notwithstanding.

And if Aziraphale had never heard about the heist? Well, Crowley had already picked out a time to swing by the bookshop with chocolates and wine. He could clandestinely celebrate his success, inching both of them closer to safety from his side without Aziraphale ever needing to worry.

But in all of Crowley’s idle day-dreams around the robbery--with the worst case scenario involving a reproachful angel in need of a mollifying dinner at The Swiss Tavern--there were two things he hadn’t expected.

The first: that Aziraphale might turn him down  _ socially _ .

The second: that the bookish principality would turn him down  _ after  _ offering up a custom tartan-wrapped thermos containing exactly what Crowley had been idly wanting for Christmas over the last century.

As he’d taken possession of the gift, moving with equal parts caution and reverence, Crowley’s heart had felt near to bursting with affection for his old friend. After everything Aziraphale’d said? Did it mean he was forgiven? They could put that old fight behind them? Get back on the same side?

No, he was a demon. Unforgivable. Unlovable. Aziraphale made that much clear. He’d barely been able to look at Crowley. And when he did? It was a look of such… pity. Pain. It  _ pained  _ the angel to look at him.

_ “ _ Wot’d I do?” Crowley wondered aloud to the Bentley, distracted as he made the quick drive back to Mayfair through the glittering late night streets. He hazarded a glance at the thermos secured beside him. It practically radiated nervous energy.

“It’s not like I asked for it!” Not outright, not with words.

Maybe though… with actions?

He frowned, deep lines curving through his cheeks. Something akin to frustrated understanding dawned. That was it, wasn’t it? Aziraphale had picked up on manipulations Crowley hadn’t even intended.

“I wanted to  _ see  _ him? For  _ company _ ?” His voice pitched higher as he scoffed at himself. “Impossible. I’m a demon, right? Must’ve been maneuvering him, yeah? Aw, look how reckless I’m being, angel. Yesss, come do the legwork for The Serpent like a  _ good  _ boy.”

He’d done it before, hadn’t he? Back Then. Seen a doe-eyed distractible angel wandering the garden, used it to his advantage. And that turned out so well for humanity.

He tried to be better. To never lie to his friend. Just show alternatives, offer simpler solutions. To find room for both of them to breathe.

He tried to fight what all the forces of Heaven and Hell told him were his nature. But if Crowley was exploiting without effort, then he wasn’t in control. Old habits and all that.

He peered at the wing mirror. As his reflection sneered at him, he thought with disgust,  _ Hail Satan, am I right? _


	2. Crowley’s Flat in Mayfair, 1967

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley needs to work on obsessive thoughts... Mostly that good good soft-sad angst.

Crowley parked the Bentley illegally outside his building and damn near flew up the stairs to his flat. Spindly black-clad legs took the steps two and three at a time. He cast open his door and flung off his round-framed sunglasses with what he considered appropriately dramatic self-loathing.

On his stately red desk in his new office, he set down the thermos of holy water and took one long step backward. _He_ was supposed to be the snake around there and yet he shifted about as though expecting to get bitten.

The grainy whorls of his fingers idled along the wide lapels of his velvet jacket, the embossed paisley pattern keeping him firmly planted in the present moment. When he could focus again, he undid the smooth buttons. It was too warm in his cold den.

Both demon and thermos entered then into a contest of wills. They stared balefully at each other, wide-eyed and unblinking. Not that Crowley blinked much as a rule, but this was a pointed and purposeful stare-down. The kind of alpha dog posturing the demon purely abhorred from the humans. But this was no human adversary, and he could make an exception.

The canister would win the battle if only barely but, until then, they were locked into it. And the one small piece of the universe that was Crowley’s and Crowley’s alone shifted beneath him, earthquakes of regret at the ready, volcanoes of shame set to erupt.

Without looking away from his newest roommate, the crimson-haired demon grabbed a cigarette from the pack in his jacket pocket. He lit the Morley with a snap of his sharp fingers. In and out, he breathed and strained for an artificially calmer place.

Crowley swallowed, his throat thick. “A little splash,” he said with a sunken terror, “all it’d take.”

He’d learned what that _stuff_ could do to a fellow demon precisely once, after which he’d quietly excused himself from the country and fell from grace in a series of bars, a failed effort to forget.

He’d do what he needed to if he had to. He’d made up his mind about that long before mustering the courage to ask for such a weapon from Aziraphale, his friend first and servant of Heaven a distant second. Didn’t mean that he’d enjoy it if… when… he needed it.

This should have been a triumph. Why wasn’t he happy? It wasn’t just the aborted heist, though he hadn’t technically called that off. Still could steal something. The pulpit? Too heavy. He’d think of something. Probably.

No, the problem was that he’d wanted to celebrate this moment with his angel. Instead, he wasn’t sure if Aziraphale would even want to _hear_ from him any time soon. They’d met today, so he couldn’t reach out tomorrow. Too risky. The day after, would that be enough time or too soon?

_Too fast for me, Crowley._

The demon sucked the air through his teeth and whirled away from the tumultuous gift, withdrawing from the staring contest.

He pushed the nearby revolving wall and entered the crossroads of the flat. He hadn’t yet figured out what he wanted to do with the awkwardly placed room. A sitting room had seemed a strange novelty--who was he going to entertain? The Dark Council? Instead, for the moment, he’d set up a row of potted plants on sturdy rectangular bases.

He’d always liked plants. They were easier than other living creatures. Not that he particularly disliked animals but, being a demon and a snake, there were a lot of factors. Plantlife was easier. Simpler. He understood their needs: water, sunlight. Simple.

He hadn’t intended to bring any home, but one temptation led to another and another. They brightened the room. Reminded him of… times. Not better times exactly but ones he missed all the same. Having lived through that long long ago, growing in strange and uncomfortable ways around the sharp-edged rocks, he knew how he’d handled the issues and could pretend they didn’t exist. There were fewer complications all around in remembering those times.

Fewer complications and… fewer feelings.

Because while he absorbed the basics of flora back then and had just as many centuries of study since, he was clearly at a loss with the care and feeding of that angel. The goalposts kept moving until he was out of breath from enduring.

Other angels at least there were standards to keep: rile up a little trouble and duck away before they could smite you, just like Downstairs suggested during their tri-century retraining courses. Of course, Crowley had been ditching out of those since the last millennia. Claiming _important work_ and _can’t be pulled away_ and _catch you at the next one_. With all the good, er, bad reports he was always putting in with Dagon down in Filing, no one in the nine circles of Hell thought to question or check in. Leaving him free to keep up with the humans, craft Rube Goldberg-esque evil plans, and… pine.

He was a damn forest for Aziraphale. Pulp him up into six thousand books.

Miserable with the soggy wet mass of his heart, Crowley stalked into the kitchen and grabbed a delicate brass plant mister. He puffed madly on a second cigarette as the mister filled under the tap.

 _We may have both started off as angels, but_ you _are fallen._

He slunk back into the planting room, Aziraphale’s admonishment cracking against his skull.

He spritzed the wide leaves of his little garden, inspecting them so he didn’t have to do the same to himself. The plants were… adequate. He wanted them to be better. Some day, he’d have the most lovely plants, and then he could adopted one out to Aziraphale and--

“Fuck.” He squinted against the sudden pain behind his yellow-slitted eyes, setting aside the mister.

Crowley grabbed the smallest pot, one of the long-stalked Aspidistra, and slumped sideways against the wall. He cradled the tiny sprout to his face for something akin to comfort.

Across the flat, looking so much like an incendiary bomb in its own right, the tartan thermos burned a hole through him.

“Aziraphale. He…” Crowley’s shoulders slumped as he whispered to the plant, a strange thing to do that felt right all the same given the depths of loneliness the demon found himself awash in. “He said I’m _too fast_ for him.”

The more he replayed the interaction in his head, snuggling the potted plant in one hand and smoking from the cigarette in his other, the more Crowley doubted if he’d heard it right.

Aziraphale had been adamantly against the holy water idea before. Then he heard about the heist. Then he just changed his mind? Did he… did he want Crowley to have it for some… other reason? They hadn’t been meeting each other much lately. Were the angels cracking down on him? He’d looked like the cat that swallowed the canary sitting in the Bentley. Were _they_ watching then?

“Stop. Stop torturing yourself,” Crowley said aloud. “This Aziraphale. Aziraphale! He’d never. He couldn’t. He… He’s an _angel_ .” _He’s my angel._

Crowley stood from the floor and paced, still clutching both plant and cigarette, though furiously puffing on the latter. Each hot drag scorched his throat anew.

Aziraphale had looked jittery from the first moment Crowley climbed into the driver’s side of the Bentley and found his angel miracled into the passenger seat. The holy water inside the thermos was the holiest of holy. Aziraphale had promised. 

Crowley’s mind jumped and he spat, “Too _fast_. What did that even mean?”

He was just trying to spend time with him. Was that so odd?

“Okay. Sure. It is. Demon, angel, all that. That’s my bad. That’s on me.”

 _Fraternizing,_ a distant ghost of a voice hissed.

“No,” Crowley keened to his own demons. “Please.”

_Should I thank you?_

_Better not._

Maybe he should return it. What good was this ticking tartan time bomb if he wasn’t using it to protect what he cared about most in all of the cosmos?

For so long it was so clear Aziraphale didn’t get it, didn’t _see_ it; Crowley had been a fool, chasing after an angel to save him from himself, hoping he’d notice the lovesick eyes the demon kept behind glass.

But tonight.

_Perhaps one day we could…_

There’d been… something? 

_I don’t know…_

Hadn’t there been?

_Go for a picnic. Dine at the Ritz._

Aziraphale was still on about what Upstairs thought. Frozen. Afraid of Falling.

“I would catch you,” Crowley whispered out to the ether.

No, that was entirely too much to ask of the angel. What was he doing? He was being ridiculous. Aziraphale was right to be scared to throw a big _fuck you_ up to Heaven. Crowley’d been there! It was no joke.

Maybe it was a mercy, Aziraphale rejecting him. Crowley knew firmly where they stood that night. Opposite sides. So all right. He was the only one who had to walk with their eyes open to the cruelty on both sides.

And he wanted to wait. He _would_ wait. For soft smiling Aziraphale and his complete trust, he could wait. It shredded and burned him from the inside out, but he would stay waiting until the day Heaven tore the wool from his angel’s pale blue eyes.

“Is that what you’re asking?” Crowley hugged the plant tighter and took a slim drag from the cigarette. “I can’t read you, angel. Do you want me… To be...?”

Unhurried. No more demands. Give him space. Give him time.

He succumbed to the cement floor, curling his legs beneath him as replayed it all in his head. Once. Twice. A dozen times.

_I can’t have you risking your life._

It was so very important that he heard it right. He played it again. And again. Committing the brief touch of their lives to eternal memory. Until the cigarette burned his fingers and the plants begged for water. Until the fringe of his shaggy mop fell long in his eyes.

Until he wanted no more than sleep eternal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of this scene inspired by this art: https://twitter.com/kokokoart/status/1136381409566842882


	3. What Happened In The Bentley, 1967

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What Crowley commits to memory. Permit the indulgence.

The Shadwell kid--Lance Corporal, so as he said--had thrown off the demon’s expectations for the night. Lost in his own amusement as he left his conversation outside  _ The Dirty Donkey _ , Crowley wasn’t paying attention when he opened the driver’s side door of his already-vintage Bentley. If he had been, he would have noticed a half second soo ner a familiar sc ent that danced out. Fresh earth and vanilla, sun-dusted leather, bergamot soaked wool.

Admittedly, this was a bit quicker than he’d expected his old friend to find out about the church job but he was always happy to see Aziraphale. Maybe it was about something else? From behind his round silver-framed sunglasses, Crowley devoured the sight of the angel in profile: all reassuring daylit sky, cloudcurls of hair framing his noble forehead. The same comfortable clothes as always.

Even though Crowley was pleased, it was still a surprise to have the angel there in his car at that precise moment. Couldn’t he have called out to him on the street, like the witchhunter-whatever had?

And so the first words he said weren’t the ones he would have chosen.

“What’re you doing here?”

The angel looked at him apologetically if ever so briefly. He hid a shy smile before turning back to face forward. “I needed a word with you.”

Oh, yes. He’d most definitely heard. This was it. Time for a tongue lashing, and not the fun kind.

Who was it that blabbed? Sally? Spike? And here Crowley had just paid out the first third of their prize. Had to have been Spike. What kind of name was that anyway, _Spike_? Lance and Skewer already taken?

Irritated, he bit out a bit too sharply, “What?”

“I work in Soho. I hear things.” Aziraphale seemed to be swallowing each thought and finding them unpalatable. “I _hear_ that you’re setting up a…”

The darting glances fell on Crowley again, his bright eyes sizing him up in an instant. Each time they’d been apart for a while, Aziraphale made a show of examining whatever new cut Crowley was making of himself. Whether he realized it or not, he was rubbish at hiding it. The demon had felt damn near undressed the time he came to rescue the angel from Madame Guillotine. Not that he wouldn’t encourage it.

But in the Bentley that night, a serious tone covered the hesitant delight in Aziraphale’s gaze as he finished his thought, saying, “ _Caper_. To rob a church.”

_Nope. Not having this conversation._ Crowley pointedly stared out the windscreen. He’d been having such a good night, too.

“Crowley, it’s too dangerous,” Aziraphale said, tone turning conspiratorial.

_‘Obviously’_ , Crowley barely managed to muzzle the memory. Stale spite crowded his thoughts over his angel’s softened pleas.

“Holy water won’t just kill your body. It will _destroy_ you completely!”

_Don’t say anything. Don’t instigate._ But he couldn’t listen to his own advice.

“You told me what you think,” Crowley said, perhaps a little unkindly as he threw the words toward his passenger, “a hundred and _five_ years ago.”

“And I haven’t changed my mind,” Aziraphale cut in. “But I  _ can’t  _ have you risking your life.”

He couldn’t do this again. It physically pained him to look away from the angel a second time.

“Not even for something dangerous,” Aziraphale chided. “So...”

The angel moved to retrieve a slender item nestled at his side by the car door. When he raised his hands, Crowley saw a modern vacuum flask between them. A signature tartan wrapper cloaks it and a cream-colored mug sat upside down atop it.

_ What. _

Aziraphale’s voice, like his hands, trembled imperceptibly as he said, “You can call off the robbery. Don’t go unscrewing the cap.”

His heart became an undertow in his chest. He didn’t know where to look, the angel or the...

Reverently, Crowley reached to take the thermos-- _ that’s the word! _ \--and the fingers of his left hand brushed along the back of Aziraphale’s where he steadied the bottom of the container.

A flash in his mind rolled up through the riptide. A creaking leather satchel. Smoldering wooden pews. Those fingers grazing against his own, two of cups now reversed. Dragging a statue out of the rubble under cover of darkness and war, memento angelus crammed into the Bentley.

But this was so much more than a simple demonic miracle to spare the angel’s beloved books.  _ This is… is… _

“S’the real thing?”

“The holiest,” Aziraphale said, barely an exhale.

_ Walls have ears. _

Crowley marveled at the canister. The watery sounds inside dragged the demon down through impossible lakes of apprehension and up again to scour his back with veneration.

No one would guess its contents weren’t some soup or tea or perfectly ordinary water. Sooner a human might expect a stash of bills than the holiest of holy, the protection from his kind he’d been desperately needing for the both of them.

“After everything you said?”

Aziraphale nodded tightly beside him, and pointedly did not look at Crowley.

There were so many boundaries he didn’t want to overstep, especially when Aziraphale had always been so careful not making a big deal out of Crowley’s rescues. But if he’d let him, the demon would have pulled Aziraphale close across the seats and cried out in joy. He’d come to his senses! He understood! They were friends, they had each other’s backs, and Satan himself couldn’t stand between that.

He wanted to say everything at once. So many words that felt too small. But he had to start somewhere. C areful not to spook the angel, he asked mildly,  “Should I say thank you?”

The answer came back quick and wounded, “Better not.”

That was fine. Aziraphale had always been more appreciative of actions than words anyway.  _ Think quick. Don’t lose this. _

“Well, can I…” He stammered over a few more words before settling on, “Can I drop you anywhere?”

_ Let me drive you home, angel, so you have your excuse to invite me in. You’ve got some new bottle you want to open? You always do. There are albums I want you to hear. The musicians, they’re very clever. Let me share them with you. _

But his hope crumpled around the polite w ords, “No,” and, “Thank you.”

Crowley’s face fell into a deep, furrowed frown. All thoughts flew from Crowley’s mind with the rejection.

“Oh, don’t look so disappointed,” Aziraphale said, tone double-edged in mercy. There was apology there in the sad smile the angel cast his way as he sighed. “Perhaps one day we could… I don’t know…”

Aziraphale furtively glanced out the window at the pedestrians.

He graced Crowley with his gaze as he continued lightly, “Go for a picnic. Dine at the Ritz.”

What was holding him back? They could go to dinner right now.

_ Let’s drop our guard and laugh where no one’s listening. I want to celebrate us tonight, angel. _

“I’ll give you a lift,” Crowley said, voice suddenly urgent. “Anywhere you want to go.”  _ Stay. Stay with me, angel. Tonight, stay. _

Aziraphale’s angelic smile didn’t reach his eyes. Under the neon lights of the Soho street, those hazel-blue eyes were all wide and shimmering, entrancing the demon with their unspilled secrets. He didn’t know the danger he was facing. He stared back with curiosity. Then his angel spoke.

“You go _too fast_ for me, Crowley.”

The words were a rustle of white wings, barely slid between them. Crowley was certain he felt his soul plummeting from atop the wall of his devotion.

_Too fast? W-what did that mean? What was too fast? The car?_ He could slow down. Probably. Maybe. Old habits were hard to break. He could _try_. Was that what that meant?

He wanted to say, _Please, angel, my heart can’t take this._ But Aziraphale made a hasty retreat, shutting Crowley in with all of his swirling terrified thoughts.

The towheaded angel cross the empty street with urgency in his steps. There was no hint in the angel’s gait to suggest he knew what fresh Hell he’d cast into the demon’s overactive imagination.

And maybe that was the point, Crowley realized with dawning horror as he snapped his attention to the thermos, blinking owlish behind his round glasses. Maybe his friend had left behind all that actually remained between them.

_What’d you just do, you old snake?_

He didn’t wait to see if Aziraphale looked before he started to drive off. 

So. Hmm. Well.

He had gone  _ too fast _ . It was up to him to figure out if he could live with that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last chap set around that night in 1967. I was debating putting it here or not but hopefully it makes sense to be here now. Thanks for reading.


	4. The Road to Armageddon Begins With a Single Step, 2008

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The calm before the storm. False security.

Crowley _hadn’t_ been lying to Aziraphale that day in St. James Park. It wasn’t a suicide pill he’d been after.

But sometimes, in the darkest times, Crowley _would_ be lying to say he didn’t think about the contents of the safe he’d miracled up shortly after that night in ‘67.

It was hard not to wonder. Wondering was what he did, what he’d always done. Question everything. What would it feel like? Was there anything After? Would the world be better off without him? Would anyone-- _Aziraphale_ \--mourn him, a demon, a Fallen angel? Probably not.

Maybe. Hopefully.

_Be careful with that hope, serpent. It’s not yours for the taking._

Sometimes the emptydark thought crept up apropos of seemingly nothing.

Humans killed the last Caspian tiger in existence? _Funny, I could stop existing, too. That’d be nice._

Y2K didn’t go as planned after decades of delicate work? _No use for a screw up like me around. Right! Time to open a thermos._

Hell demanding a face-to-face? _Yeah, sure, I guess but… what if I wasn’t_ around _for it?_

He didn’t mean it, not really. Except when he did. The sort of joke that’s not a joke if someone else agrees like, _Ha ha, angel, wouldn’t it be silly if I held your hand and all these people thought I was sweet on you?_

Crowley had checked on Aziraphale’s thermos plenty of times over the years, fingers twitching like they had back in the Garden, reaching for equally forbidden fruit. A pang of dread burrowed beneath her nails and leached into her veins, saying the angel had given over nothing more dangerous than water from the tap. If she needed to use it in defense, someone would end up damp and she’d end up throttled. Good joke, that.

Whenever Crowley went to to the thermos out of idle curiosity, everything was fine. She’d pick it up, give it a good shake to make sure the water hadn’t evaporated. Who knew what being in close proximity to hellish forces for decades could do to the stuff, after all. This was uncharted territory.

What the demon hadn’t noticed, simply could not have, was all the times that she hadn’t touched it. In those moments, the siren-song of the void carried feet over stone and hands to the swinging Mona Lisa sketch that hid the safe from unwelcome scrutiny. If there was even the most minuscule sense of sincerity to Crowley’s pained desire, a prayer was answered.

On the night that Crowley met two Dukes of Hell in a graveyard in Buckinghamshire, she had been in high spirits. She’d wrapped up a long-term project, taking down a large swathe of the mobile phone network in the Greater London area. Sure, getting called away from London to take a meeting was something she deeply dreaded but this time they didn’t actually need her at head office. There was some quaint parish church, dated back to the Middle Ages, with a healthy crop of graves out front. _That_ was where they’d all meet.

As she surged the Bentley up the A413, a moment of heat crossed her lightly freckled cheeks. “They can’t know,” she said. “Can they?”

After what Crowley had pulled off with the London Orbital motorway, the mobile disaster was precisely the level of delicate, deliberate, and far-reaching work that she assumed the forces of Hell associated with her in the current era of human advancement. But unless there were more immediate ramifications that the demon had overlooked, surely she wasn’t getting recognition for this so soon. Perhaps in a few years, the full mastery of that night’s plan would unfurl like a moth’s wings to the moonlight, but tonight? N-nah.

She was right, of course. Where Crowley was fast-- _don’t go there_ \--the legions of the damned moved rather more at the excruciatingly leaden pace expected of them. As such, unbeknownst to her, that project more than thirty years before was the one paying off, the reports finally all gone through.

But a small desire for more immediate gratification over a Job Well Done tugged at her ear, causing one corner of her lips to follow suit.

Off the main roads, a clinging fog devoured the light from the Bentley’s headlamps. She wasn’t far from the designated graveyard but she was still late. More often than not, that was the case. Everything always took longer than she accounted for, even on the very dullest of days. But when a project was underway--worse when a project was on its very last, exacting day--time slipped and skipped like an old scratched CD.

_Or an old record on that player in the bookshop._

Crowley tried not to think about Aziraphale when she was likely to encounter fellow demons. Best to keep the angel far, far from her thoughts, lest she grow distracted or look too fond over some memory as she was want to do, mind always associating without her permission. But driving was safe. The _Bentley_ was safe. Only Aziraphale ever joined her there, leaving behind no more than biscuit crumbs and that bookdust smell and a tender ache in Crowley’s heart.

But when the M25 preoccupied her thoughts, Aziraphale was never far away.

The angel had been the one to point Crowley toward the dread sigil Odegra, after all. Found it in one of his tomes, chattered about it as they enjoyed a particularly elegant Inglenook, and inadvertently inspired the demon to reach for higher heights in mayhem-causing.

Crowley had even practiced his progress presentation in front of the angel, as he’d been so nervous to explain it all to his bosses. Would they get it? The hilariousness? The genius? He’d done a few year’s work, bribing officials and getting very good at a new bit of criminal enterprise called hacking--and physically moving a few surveyor’s polls across a field by himself under cover of darkness, because who else was he going to trust with those small but occultishly significant changes? And when all was said and done, that energy would feel like unto the barest flick of his wrist compared to the endless decades of commuter frustration spilling on the tarmac.

 _Hail the Great Beast. Devourer of Worlds._ The promise of the sigil. Going strong, three decades hence.

Crowley tittered as she turned the Bentley onto the dirt road of St. Mary’s, remembering the delightful little ‘wahoo!’ Aziraphale had given at the end of that presentation. When asking for a similar show of exuberance from the assembled Dukes and Lords of Hell, the reaction had been the exact tepid flavor Crowley had always known from them.

But it had made the demon smile nonetheless.

That mid-August night in the early twenty-first century, two of those selfsame Dukes lurked in the Bentley’s headlights, almost forcibly melding themselves into the shadows beside a peeking stone parish and beneath the sullen beeches.

The demons were a solid oil spill of shadows and a gangrenous ghost, lizard- and toad-headed respectively. Dukes Ligur and Hastur.

_Shit. S’important._

She cut the engine with a thought.

_Calm down. Can’t be bad, or we wouldn’t be out in the middle of nowhere._

A deep focused breath cooled her throat. A run of her hands over the fabric of her skinny jeans, importantly familiar against too-thin thighs. Her mental armour settled around her broad shoulders as though black wings manifested.

She could do this.

Crowley made her exit, throwing a predatory swing into her already pendulous hips. Beneath her boots, last autumn’s leaves crunched in an even rhythm.

If the demon knew what she walked toward, the anguish she'd inherit, Crowley would have slowed that pace to a crawl.


	5. St. Mary’s of Amersham, 2008

Ahead of Crowley, the dukes greeted her with raised hands. “Hail Satan,” said Hastur.

“Hail Satan!” Ligur echoed.

“N-uh. Hi, guys.” Crowley said, raising her hand in reply. The two dukes had been waiting and their patience seemed thin. “Sorry I’m late but you know how it is on the A40 at Denham. I tried to cut up towards Chorleywood--”

Hastur cut off her excuses. “Now that we all art here,” he said, slickblack eyes boring into the lesser demon, “let us recount the deeds of the day.”

“Of course. _Deeds_ , yeah.” It was an old tradition. Tedious. Crowley shoved her fingers into too-small pockets. They were one of the better, more subtle ideas the demon had had over the years, if she had to guess based on how much _she_ hated them.

Hastur went first on recounting. Naturally. The braggart.

“I have tempted a priest,” he said, voice lofty. He raised his pale chin, shaking back the hair of his white wig that kept his companion hidden this evening. “As he walked down the street, he saw all the pretty girls in the sun. I put doubt into his mind. He would have been a saint.”

Crowley nodded, as appropriate, but already felt her mind start to wander.

“Now, within a decade,” Hastur continued with a leering smirk, “we shall have him.”

A decade? On one soul? Crowley forced a thin chuckle and smiled through her teeth. “Yeah, nice one.”

There was no way these two had heard about her project. _What’s this all about then?_

Ligur interjected next, staring at Crowley almost in challenge. “ _I_ have corrupted a politician. Let him think that a _tiny_ bribe wouldn’t hurt.”

He sounded very proud. Crowley couldn’t understand why. Politicians really, well, historically, they were almost made for corruption.

“Within a year,” Ligur said with marked intensity, “ _we shall have him_.”

She got the lay of their dick-measuring then.

Bobbing in anticipation, Crowley couldn’t help the self-satisfied smile that crept onto her face. “Right, you’ll like this. I brought down _every_ _London area mobile phone network_ tonight.”

She grinned fully. And waited.

She swayed, ready for their approval.

Hastur’s oily eyes flashed with confusion. “Yeah?”

“Yeah! It wasn’t easy. I had to--”

“And what exactly has that done to secure souls for our master?” asked Hastur, damn near accusatory, like she’d been the one poncing about whispering evil thoughts at souls already half-damned and not Ligur.

They really didn’t get it, the relics!

“Och, come on, think about it!” She failed to suppress her own delight, scoffing with laughter. “Fifteen _million_ pissed-off people who take it out on each other.”

Ligur sneered. “It’s not exactly… Hmm. Craftsmanship.”

She bit her tongue. Quite literally.

From behind her sunglasses, Crowley flicked her gaze between the dukes. She’d worked hard! And even if they couldn’t see it, didn’t get it, that was no reason for the thick shame that had started to pool in her stomach.

On the defensive, not where she wanted to be, Crowley hissed, “Well, head office don’t seem to mind. They love me down there. Guys. Times are changing. So…”

It was pointless arguing. She had better things to do. Better beings to associate with.

She shrugged sharply and sniffed with disdain. “What’s up?”

Hastur’s voice filled with grim meaning as he answered, “This is.”

Ligur bent to retrieve an item shrouded in shadows at his feet. He lifted the woven basket by its twisting handle.

_Basket._

If Crowley had been dunked in an ice pool, she couldn’t have been more quickly numbed or had all playful smugness evicted as thoroughly and accurately. Two words and a glance at that hell-sent basket and her mind turned to radio static.

Crowley rejected her new reality.

“No.”

“Yes,” Duke Ligur corrected.

Static. Crackling. Screeching between her ears until another word struggled forth from the floe. “Already?”

Duke Hastur strode toward Crowley until they were a mere foot apart. “Yes.”

With her brain opening and closing connections at random, fight, flight, freeze all at war, in a fit of hyper-awareness the serpent of Eden caught all the details of the other demon she tried so often to avoid. The smudged edges of Hastur’s trench coat. The frayed collar of his lapel and the pulled-thread scarf. The rotten stink of sulphur and throat-choking smoke, still clinging all those hours after Crowley had been told to arrive.

The state of him was a most vicious reminder of Hell, where the noblesse seemed so impossibly comfortable and Crowley was… was most assuredly not. Nothing was comfortable for her then, not sharp-visioned thoughts of Downstairs and not standing on suddenly aching legs in a graveyard on Earth, about to take a task she hoped was still another thousand years away. A thousands years and someone else’s problem.

Horrified, Crowley asked, “And it’s up to me to…?”

In dark chorus, the Dukes of Hell answered, “Yes.”

The basket lurched forward.

Crowley fought every instinct to recoil, stammering out, “You know, listen, it… Mm-ff-nnn… really isn’t my scene.”

The basket was offensive. It was impossible. Her face scrunched up in displeasure as she shook her head, a steady stream of _no no no_ bashing against her skull. How could they ask this of her?

“Your scene. Your starring role.” Ligur menaced in whisper, “ _Take_ it.”

Hastur, sounding almost cheery, offered, “Like you said, times are changing.”

Ligur grinned. “They’re coming to an end, for a start.”

“Why me?” Crowley hissed, curiosity finally getting the better of her.

“Well, they love you down there,” answered Hastur readily. Crowley caught the sarcasm as the duke continued. “And what an opportunity! Ligur here would give his right arm to be you tonight.”

“Or someone’s right arm, anyway,” the other duke said, his black-rimmed eyes drilling a hole through Crowley that told her exactly whose arm he was thinking about. The hell-lizard on his head inched closer with a dead-eyed hunger.

There was a contract suddenly, also shoved in Crowley’s direction. Hastur told her where to sign.

She just couldn’t fathom it. Her? In charge of… of… _Delivery?_ That would kick it all off, wouldn’t it? No turning back. No more time. No more anything. No more any _one_. At least, no one like they had been over the millennia.

_Stop it! Do not think about--! Just stop._

She licked the tip of her finger, a spark of hellfire lighting up. It wasn’t like she could refuse. This was Armageddon.

Crowley signed her true name, a swirling symbol like she was some demonic Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Her fingertip flamed as the contract sealed her immortal soul to its sinister purpose and she reeled back.

 _So. That’s that._ Pulling back up a comforting if detached bravado, Crowley shook her head so that her winespill hair fell forward. “Now what?”

Hastur said, “You will receive your instructions. And why so glum? The moment we have been working for all these centuries is at hand.”

“Centuries?” she repeated hollowly, wondering how Hastur could believe the party line so strongly.

“Our moment of eternal triumph awaits,” Ligur rallied.

Through gritted teeth, Crowley said, “Triumph.”

“And you,” Hastur added, oily eyes wide and wet and terrible, “will be a _tool_ of that glorious destiny.”

“Glorious. Tool. Yeah.” _This is enough. Get moving._ “Okay. I’ll, um, be off then.”

At long last and because she quite literally no other option, Crowley took the accursed basket from Ligur’s outstretched hand.

“Get it over with,” she snarled aloud to herself.

_Shit._

She recovered quickly, saying, “No, I _want_ to get it over with, obviously, but I’ll be popping along. Great. Fine. Yeah.”

Crowley took several halting steps backward toward the graves and the lights of the Bentley beyond. Then the sight of the basket in her hands made her already traitorous legs weaken. She spared one last glance at her fellow demons and made a speedy retreat from the dukes at her back.

She affected an extra predatory twist to her thin hips. It would not do to let on how riotously panic-inducing she found the wicker picnic basket, especially not to the likes of those who would report back to Lord Beelzebub zirself. _Keep it cool, keep it together._

“Ciao,” she called, feigning effortlessness.

She wanted to throw up.

 _Right foot, left foot._ Do not _stumble, you prattling fool. You’re holding the actual Spawn of Satan in your hands._

The driver’s side door of the Bentley opened a bit too eagerly. She leaned her seat forward and deposited the future Lord of All Darkness onto the red leather bench seat in the back, motions mechanical.

_Now get in._

She slithered into the seat, feeling bone deep cold despite the August night.

 _Good. Start it._ _Get the heaven out of here before they realize… a-anything._

The Bentley rolled with exceeding caution back down the drive of St. Mary’s, back to the main road, back to the fog-filled forests.

Her heart thundered in her chest and down through her feet. Her throat threatened to swallow her. Was there anything to eat? Could she choke on a CD case and call it a day?

The car would crash. The Antichrist would die. It could all start over again. Easy-peasy. Lemon squeezy.

The downside? There would be an awful lot of explaining to do when she arrived in Hell, without a body and without her charge.

Also, the kid. He was just a babe. Hadn’t done anything world-ending yet. Maybe he wouldn’t?

No. She couldn’t. She couldn’t kill a kid. Not even circumstantially in a car crash. Not even a prophesied destroyer of kings and father of lies.

More to the fact, Crowley couldn’t handle this kind of pressure. Not without a several bottles of whiskey at least.

Crowley wanted Aziraphale.

No, she _needed_ him. If she could talk to the angel, her clever bookish angel who always had answers or could find them if he didn’t, then he’d come up with an idea on how to stop this. Stop her.

But she couldn’t even think of her friend. Couldn’t even _think_ of him! Not until all of the Antichrist hullabaloo was over.

 _Oh, hell,_ the demon thought. _How long is this gonna take? What if I need to… to stick by him? Protect him? I know Earth. I know the humans! Why did I stay up here? Did I do this to myself?_

She didn’t even know what her instructions were and already every moment was excruciating. Crowley felt, in a word, royally fucked.


	6. The Road to Tadfield Manor, 2008

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heading to Dragon Con in mere minutes but wanted to post something before I go on this. So, less edited than normal. Thank you everyone who's been reading! I've loved your comments, they are very supportive and encouraging. :3

Crowley was all in favor of Armageddon in general terms. But it was one thing to work to bring it about, and quite another for it to actually happen.

She didn’t know where she was going. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the living, breathing, squirming parcel in her backseat. The demon gripped the Bentley’s steering wheel, knuckles white and fingers aching.

“Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit! Shit!” She growled with growing intensity, “Shit! Shit! Shit!  _ Why me? _ ”

The announcer on the radio, playing Queen still, cut through the pea soup of her panic to say, “...in 1975,  _ it was because you earned it, Crowley, _ didn’t you?”

For the second time that night, Crowley felt the proverbial rug yoinked out from under her.

That drawl wasn’t the Lord of the Files. That was the really big boss. Satan himself. Talking. Directly. To Crowley. Well, an approximation thereof anyway, channeled through the British radio man.

Lucifer continued, voice honeyed and edging toward one Freddie Mercury. “What you did to the M25 was a stroke of demonic genius, darling.”

“The M25? Yeah, well… W-nn-nn, yeah, I’m glad it went down so well.” Could she hear herself?

Delight filled the voice on the radio as her boss said, “Here are your instructions!”

Hellish incense drifted from the vents of the Bentley, giving Crowley a moment of panic-- _ what’re they doing to my car!? _ \--before the glowing smoke seized her. She stared, unseeing, hands on the wheel.

“This is the big one, Crowley,” Satan said, an unwelcome intimacy passing between them that left the lesser demon feeling stripped bare. Eviscerated.

She was barely cognizant of the return of the music, her mind caught in the hypnotic drone of the instructions boring into her. It took the high, bright lights of a lorry and an accompanying shrill horn for Crowley to pull back into her senses.

She cranked the wheel and, not that the demon realized, the last of the Dark Council’s directions floated past their recipient. The hellsmoke harmlessly dissipated through the Bentley’s back window.

The picnic hamper slid sharply on the back bench seat to slap against the side of the car. The top flipped up, scaring and confusing the Antichrist. He wailed his displeasure.

Crowley pulled over.

She knew what the plan was. What her part in all of this had to be. It wasn’t predestined, that much she knew. Could have been any demon with enough mileage under their belt and in good--bad--graces to be considered loyal enough to the Big Boss. Loyal enough but also disposable if they stepped out of line.

With shaking fingers, Crowley moved her sunglasses up her forehead into her long wine-red hair, the motion exposing the snake mark at her jaw near her ear. It was not quite a tattoo. No one had given it to her with stick and ink. It was more correct to call it a brand, burned into them with the Fall. It had been there as long as she’d had those sun-slack yellow eyes, which she squeezed shut against the thunder of her thoughts.

The child in her backseat continued to wail.

_ You have to do this. They’ll kill you if you don’t. They’ll find you. _

She contemplated his options.

_ They’ll find you. _

There really weren’t any options.

She was to deliver the baby to a place less than half an hour away. Village by name of Tadfield near Oxford. On the outskirts was a convent at Tadfield Manor. The nuns there were no devotees of the Almighty but rather to the lovely chap who’d just gotten off the radio. Satanic nuns. Crowley had met them in passing over the years, an order dedicated to St. Beryl. They… they talked a lot. No filter whatsoever. They’d be expecting her, and the baby, that shortly evening.

She’d’ve had more time if she’d hadn’t been late for her meeting with the two dukes. Everything had been timed down to the minute.

Crowley snapped her fingers and the picnic basket closed once more, shielding the Adversary from the streetlights. That seemed to do the trick, and her lord’s son returned to quiet comfort.

She began driving. She couldn’t afford to delay.

As the radio faded to static in her brain, the demon slipped his glasses back down to cover her eyes and thought it all through.

Child to Tadfield Manor. Give him over to the nuns. They would make the switch, get rid of the other child, Bob’s your uncle, over and done with on their part.

It was what came after that boiled like molten lead in the pit of Crowley’s empty stomach: in close range but without arousing suspicion, she was to see to the child’s proper upbringing, that the Prince of All Darkness might come into his full power on the afternoon of his eleventh birthday and bring about Armageddon.

The forces of Evil would triumph over Good.

And everything Crowley loved--humans, lovely wonderful inventive questioning humans, with their music and plays and television productions and technology; her car and her flat and her clothes; and a bookshop in Soho and everything  _ that _ entailed--would end up in flames. A puddle of boiling goo, ruled over by the little imp bouncing along in the back of the Bentley and getting his first but not last earful of Mercury, May, Taylor, and Deacon.

She was on automatic, arriving at Tadfield Manor without recognition of roads and signs.

As she scooped up the basket and slunk away from the car, she even left it running, lights on, music blaring, driver’s side door still swung open.

“You’ve left your lights on,” said a nervous gent by the front door, lighting up a cigarette.

_ I need about ten of those, _ Crowley thought as she snapped her fingers, dragging up the demonic miracle to shut down the car without thinking about this human might think upon witnessing it.

The man gave a pleased noise. “Oh! That’s clever. Is it infra-red?”

Crowley gave the man a brief second look. The diplomat father. He would have been sent out so the switch could occur without arousing suspicion. “Has it started?”

“Uh, I think we were getting along, Doctor.”

“Right. What room?”

“Uh, r-room three!” the man said helpfully, not knowing what he was saddling himself with by those two words.

“Room three. Got it.”

Though Crowley remembered handing over her Lord’s child to a nun--she remembered the too-sweet face and the too-delighted comments from the woman, and the sneer of confusion upon her own face--once she stepped into the convent it all became a blur. Like it were happening to some other demon. Any other demon.

She kept her thoughts locked up best she could.

Stepping back into the cool August air, all at once, she felt the chains of duty drop off. The great eye of evil had shifted focus. Oh, she still had work to do that was certain. But the contract Crowley had signed before Dukes Hastur and Ligur was complete.

Crowley stumbled against the nearby brick wall, clutching a hand to her chest and wincing. She was glad that the man she’d seen on the way in wasn’t still puttering about to see her nearly double over. It wasn’t quite pain, more like a vice grip relaxing after holding her too long and too tightly, residual aches and bruises.

The last time she’d felt Satan’s will imposed upon her so strongly it had been a very bad day to be a carpenter from Galilee. And all she’d been asked to do then was witness, make certain no devotees got in the way.

She still doesn’t know if she could have stopped anyone back then. Her heart hadn’t been in it, thrice shattered over the Almighty’s damnable Plan suddenly including torture of man meant to be a son. But that day, no one had moved to interfere in the end. Not really. Water for a dying man, Crowley had decided, was a small mercy the forces of the damned could look away from.

But nearly two thousand years later, another son was born and this time of hellish influence. Would Crowley be asked to watch this one’s end as well? Or just his growth?

Certainly, they were asking her to watch everything else end because of him.

In the Bentley, driving with singular purpose back to Mayfair, Crowley stuttered out a tight breath. “Call Aziraphale,” she says, enunciating clearly for her phone.

It responded pleasantly, “Calling Aziraphale.”

_ Shit, fuck, please pick up, angel. I need you. _

But before there could ever be a ring, a different a tone struck from the phone. “We’re sorry,” it said. “All lines to London are busy.”

She gaped and growled. Had it only been a few hours ago that she reveled in her trick? Seemed decades ago.

_ Can’t reach Aziraphale, _ she thought desperately, burning her way back to civilization.  _ Can’t warn him. Can’t get him to make this all better. This is it. Armageddon. _

At the first call box she spotted once she reached the city, Crowley cranked the wheel of the Bentley and parked as she pleased, long legs carrying her to her life line in a flash. Practiced fingers dialed the old phone with a number committed to memory in the late nineteen-fifties.

On the second ring and too many catastrophic thoughts later, that angelic voice came through clear and safe. “I’m afraid we’re quite definitely closed.”

The demon weakened with relief, aware suddenly of how much she took it for granted that the angel was always only a phone call away.

“Aziraphale,” she hissed, voice low from the strain and unreality of her evening. Could Aziraphale hear the nuance? “It’s me. We need to talk.”

“Yes, I rather think we do. Is this about…?” The angel let silence drift through the telephone lines.

So. He’d heard. Damn but his people were quick.

“Armageddon,” she said. “Yesss.”

There was no need to discuss it further. They’d meet shortly before eleven that morning at their favored bench in St. James Park, not more than a pleasant stroll from the bookshop.

When she arrived back at her flat, Crowley wasn’t thinking about  _ tomorrow _ with its endless possibilities for everything going pear shaped.

She was stuck solidly on Aziraphale.

Heaven had told him about the Antichrist. They knew before she could reach him. How was that even possible? Did they have agents on the inside? Did they  _ actually want a war _ ? And what of her angel? Was he planning on… Obeying? After everything he’d seen of how beautiful the world could be and how ugly Upstairs could get, would he be able to set aside his sword a second time?

_ No, he’ll be a wreck. He’ll be as bad as me. Has to be. _

_ But he sounded so calm… _

Hell and Heaven would get their war one way or another. But then what? They… they fight? Would Aziraphale fight  _ her _ ? Would she fight  _ him _ ?

_ No. I won’t. Can’t. _

Crowley knew that whatever happened, she would rather risk complete destruction than ever take up arms against Aziraphale. And any war that existed between Hell and Heaven would be a war against everything that bastard angel stood for. He still didn’t see all the ways that Upstairs was fucking him over. Oh, he understood it existed, she saw that right enough. But he put up blinders. Better to be impossible, spouting off heavenly doctrine, than see the ways the other angels stole pieces of him and bled him dry.

Kept them apart.

How many times had Aziraphale reminded her: she was a demon, she was Fallen, they were on opposite sides. It felt like every time they’d seen each other, this wall got put up between them. Which was funny in that way that it wasn’t, since the first wall for them had been shared.

Atop the garden wall, there had been no divide.

Crowley dropped into her red and gold throne, thinking of the only way she’d ever fight in that war: if it was to protect what she cared about. But the Glory of Hell? The greater evil winning?

She sneered. She didn’t want that! Not that she wanted the so-called Good Guys to win either.

She wanted  _ this _ . This world.

With Aziraphale alongside her to enjoy it all. Together.

_ And in eleven years it’ll all just… end. Take it away by force! By a small golden-haired American boy. _

Her stomach rolled. Upset wasn’t a strong enough word for what Crowley was experiencing. She wanted to eat something just so she could vomit it back up.

The demon gnawed on the outside edge of her hand, occupying her jaw so she didn’t go for something she might actually be able to swallow. Her whole body ached in that deep way it got when she’d forget to exert her expectations and her body started to think it was a snake deep down, not that human-shaped being she preferred most days.

Like liquid, she slid to the floor. Even sitting had become too much.

From where the demon had slunk to the floor, a smiling face caught in her attention, hypnotizing the serpent as surely as if she had looked into her own sulphur-yellow eyes.

The painting smirked at her from behind the throne, seeming to ask, Who could blame her?

She goes to it, standing in a smooth arc, thick boot heels clicking in the minimally decorated flat.

The lock of the safe spun. She just wanted to entertain the idea.

_ Can I just rest? It’s been so long. Mother, _ please _ , sleep doesn't help. There’s just so much. It’s caught in my marrow. Someone break my bones and suck it out? _

The thermos seemed to glow with heavenly light, though she knew it did not. Never had. A trick of her weary mind.

Aching, Crowley reached for it, to touch it, touch it like she’d done dozens of times since she first tucked it away in there, safe. Safe.

For someday. For someone. For someone who would…

_ It would destroy you, _ whispered a ghost of a memory.

Her boney fingers hovered centimeters from the vinyl wrap.

_ Don’t go unscrewing the cap. _

That damn tartan. The blues, the tans, the subtle red. Criss-crossed, hatched across her soul.

_ We could, I don’t know… Go for a picnic. _

“Aziraphale,” she intones, voice prayerful. Oh, her heart swelled, overflowed. The hateful thing strained in her chest as she thought of those changing blue eyes, that beautiful angel and his good intentions.

He’d given her this. After everything he’d said. He hadn’t understood her motivations still, but the angel  _ trusted _ Crowley. When the demon had asked for the holy water, it was not for her to do this.

She bit her lower lip and stepped back.

She couldn’t betray his trust. Especially not with the End Times ahead.

A snap of her fingers and the safe and painting returned to their previous positions, undisturbed.

They’d face it together. They had to. She owed him that much. She owed their friendship more than that.

_ Think, think. What can we do to prevent it? How can I keep you? _

Crowley crawled into bed, slithering under the charcoal sheets, soothed by the cool texture. She let her imagination go wild, clicking into place like the gears on a lock, until she had it just right: a way for an angel and a demon to make the boy choose not to end the world.

They could do it. Together.


	7. A.Z. Fell & Co., Booksellers, 21st August, 2019

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eleven years later...

It was another evening in late August, eleven years to the day. And it should have worked.

_No dog. Wrong boy._

Crowley gave a labored sigh, holding their head in one subtly shaking hand. “Why did the powers of Hell have to drag me into this anyway?” they lamented.

The pair had extricated themselves from the disaster of an eleventh birthday party at the Dowling Estate and made impressive time back to Soho, even by Crowley’s standards of what a driving time should take. A quick change of clothes and a decision to drink their terror under the table later, the serpent and the guardian set to grieving in the southern wing of the bookshop.

“Well. Don’t quote me on this,” Aziraphale said, his voice chastising as he poured two fingers of whisky for each of them, “but I’m pretty sure it’s because you kept sending them all those memos. Saying how _amazingly well_ you were doing.”

Crowley snapped their gaze up to the angel. “It’s my fault they never check up? I’m to blame they never check up?”

They anchored long fingers around the cut crystal of the whisky glass.

Crowley was correct in their assessment that they were not at fault, not that they knew as much for certain. Their reports and memos had amassed a chilling reputation among Hell’s clerical department, no easy feat among that crowd. If Crowley had noticed earlier in the day how Dagon, Lord of the Files, sounded damn near gleeful to ask if something had gone wrong with the hellhound, they might have started to ponder this.

But they didn’t.

Ever since Crowley had first been assigned to the Garden, Lord Dagon had gone through countless assistants, each driven mad in ways no one should ever have to endure. _That_ Crowley _could_ take the blame for, assuming they ever learned of it.

Which they wouldn’t.

Of late, a lower level legion assisted the Lord of the Files specifically regarding the activities of the demon Crowley. The assistant had cataloged Crowley’s paperwork for centuries. Somehow, despite all odds, they had become an eager fan of the faithfully obedient reports: from the most minor of demonic interventions meticulously and unnecessarily detailed to the heavy tomes of decades-long spots of mischief-making budgeted and accounted for down to the minute. To the right demon, those communiques read like pop culture reference guides coupled with a serialized adventure novel. A reality show with an audience of, well, Eric.

Hope that a life existed beyond the literal sludge of Hell’s overcrowded subterranean halls was precious and dangerous. So the assistant filing demon did everything in their extremely limited power to keep their supply securely where it was: on Earth, unobserved and undisturbed.

Thus, blame for the general lack of inquiry into Crowley’s more everyday affairs fell to them.

To Aziraphale, Crowley pleaded, “Everyone stretches the truth a bit in memos to head office.”

“Yes. But you told them you _invented the Spanish Inquisition_ and _started the Second World War_.” The accusation was clear.

“So the humans beat me to it. That’s not my fault!”

Crowley was about to launch into a further panicked explanation of why their deceptions and lies of omission were perfectly reasonable given the circumstances, but stopped. They listened, then scented the air, trying to catch the barest hint more of what skittered across their demonic senses.

“Something’s changed,” they whispered.

Across the small table, Aziraphale smiled tightly, as if unsure about but willing to take the sudden change in conversation. “Oh, it’s a new cologne. My barber suggested-”

Crowley cut him off, irritable and distracted. “No, I know what _you_ smell like.”

The demon stilled. Distant cries of delight and dread dueled as the ripple of The Adversary’s aura laughed out across all hellthings. Like his unholy father before him on a road to Tadfield, Crowley felt the Destroyer peer into their body and soul. They were naked and undefended. Judged unworthy.

Crowley’s face fell slack. “The hell-hound has found its master.” Their words were little more than a drone.

“Are you sure?”

“I felt it.” The passion returned to their voice and body and mind as Crowley said, “Would I lie to you?”

Aziraphale’s too blue gaze leveled at Crowley’s behind their sunglasses. “Obviously. You’re a demon. That’s what you do.”

_Obviously._

_Obv-eh-uh-sly._

Crowley picked away the pain of Aziraphale’s jab, wondering, _All this time? That’s what you still jump to? I can’t with you right now._

“Well, I’m not lying,” they bit. “The boy, wherever he is, has the dog. He’s coming into his power.”

Across the small table, Crowley considered briefly all that lay between themself and the angel. Hell and Heaven would figure out it was Crowley’s fault, eventually. The other demons weren’t exactly quick on the uptake, but there wasn’t long before the Apocalypse would get rolling so, not much time for them to be in the dark then, was there?

 _Where can we go that they won’t follow? They’ll know we’re working together. They’ll sniff out that you’re my side. That I care more about you than whatever it is they think I should care about that_ isn't _you._

Crowley frowned, swallowing all their words but two. “We’re doomed.”

Dawning realization lit across Aziraphale’s too gentle features. He blinked and lifted his whisky glass to his lips. “Well then,” he said in a hushed tone. “Welcome to the end times.”

Aziraphale downed the drink.

* * *

For the next several hours, the only beings on Earth who knew anything was amiss about Armageddon chased their terror down bottles of whisky and gin and reminiscing. On one trip into the cellar--with the demon sharing how they’d once gotten out of a bind by convincing a daughter of Bacchus that she could divine fortune from spilled wine and the next thing all the priestesses were doing it--the two uncovered a thickly dusted absinthe. Aziraphale had set aside while Crowley had been depression-napping in the late eighteen hundreds.

“Another nap’s not sssuch a bad idea, to be honest,” Crowley said when they back in their spot on the long sofa in the east wing, choking on the smooth floral sting of the drink. They rolled a smile toward Aziraphale. “Care to join me?”

Aziraphale smirked as he leaned his head to rest against the back of his chair. His eyes had started glimmering at the second hour of indulging. “Would be a rather… rude awakening.”

 _Hold up._ Crowley sat up straightish and settled their dark glasses atop their short cropped hellfire hair. _That wasn’t a no exactly._

“W-what would be?” Their gaze unfocused, they stayed trained on the angel.

“Arma… Armageddon. Napping and the world just...” Aziraphale gestured with his absinthe glass as he shut his eyes. “All gone.”

Crowley frowned. Yeah, they could just see it. Everything a ruin of demonic and angelic in-fighting. The son of Satan astride his hell-hound, legions of the damned at his command, the Horsepersons laying waste to humanity with glee. No more bookshop. No more Soho, or London, or England. No more hiding whatever they were from their respective sides. The bright exposure would burn away their Arrangement, leave them streaked and darkened, empty negatives.

_Well, that’s a right mood killer._

Crowley sighed, purposely dramatic, forcing a change into the space. “S’pose they’ll be in touch soon. Better, you know, not be _here_. When they come looking for me.”

The demon stood sharply. Too quick. They wavered, their legs aching from the sudden expectation of use. One rawboned hand shot out, catching against the nearby metal behemoth that was Aziraphale’s cash register. Their fingers jammed against the spindly keys. “Ow, shit.”

“Crowley?”

They waved away Aziraphale’s concerns, not looking back, headed toward the door. Had to get out of there. Had to keep the angel safe.

“Right. Well then. I’ll just… Be off.”

They heard Aziraphale protest again, but they were already gone. Drunk, so very very drunk, they got behind the wheel of the Bentley. The radio roared to life on Schubert’s _Save Me_ . “ _I clothed myself in your glory and your love. How I loved you, how I cried_ -”

Crowley snapped and their car shut its trap.

They drove through the haze of wine and worry, reckless in the still-crowded streets of the late London evening. They rolled down the windows and let the wind whip at their skin. They fought off tears and sobs and blew through red lights and scared pedestrians.

At one point, they miracled up a bottle of vodka because they were feeling hateful of their stomach. The demon stumbled out of the Bentley and down the path to the ducks, to shout obscenities and ask them why they didn’t give any warning about the boy Warlock. Couldn’t they tell when he’d been by over the years?

The world was ending. All of it, everything, ducks and ponds and rivers and grass and bread and Aziraphale and the Bentley and theaters and discotheques and just everything. It was all going away. And the ducks hadn’t even had the decency to say something about one small normal human child. 

“Thanksss for nothing, you feckless cadgers!”

Back at their flat, more drunk than they’d left the bookstore, Crowley stared down the dial of their hidden safe.

“Nothing,” they said. “Nothing left. Why watch it burn?”

They spun the dial, left right left, and cranked it open.

“My old friend,” Crowley said to the white capped tartan thermos where it stood, stately and poised. “It’s… It’s all too much.”

A tears slipped out from beneath their dark glasses. They didn’t bother to hide it.

Crowley swallowed down the tension and reached tentative hands to the thermos and the holy water within. The world would be better without them. They’d messed it all up enough, hadn’t they? Maybe something could be done if they weren’t in the way stirring the pot.

As soon as their fingers touched the flask, Crowley hissed and recoiled. Something had changed.

The demon sobbed, holding his hands as though he’d been burned. Crowley wanted to rail against whatever had decided that now, now, now of all times it should be too holy to the touch. But as he cradled his hands, an old familiar feeling sunk straight into his bones, through phalanges and metacarpals, ulna and humerus, ribs and sternum. He hadn’t felt it so strongly for eleven years to the day, but it screamed at him, one word, staccato against his breast: _Aziraphale. Aziraphale. Aziraphale._

Crowley gasped and shook, turning away from the safe. He paced the flat, leered at his plants. He draped himself across his desk and gave the most self-indulgent whine he could manage.

None of it was working.

_Aziraphale, Aziraphale, Aziraphale._

The thought wouldn’t leave. He felt like an utter fool, but a fool in pain and in love. So he gave in to his heart and headed back to the Mayfair street.


	8. A.Z. Fell & Co., Booksellers, 22nd August, 2019

Crowley banged the palm of his hand against the door for a second time, impatient, and unable to consider the alternatives if Aziraphale had stepped out after midnight. He leaned his forehead against the cool glass. “Aziraphale, open up, you-”

The bookshop door swung open, the bell above jingling cheery and discordant with the hour. Crowley barely managed to catch himself from falling.

Aziraphale was on the other side. Where he’d always been for the past six millenia. A flash of worry creased his brow at the sight Crowley cut--the jangling bones of him tied together with string, clacking beneath the costumery of his fashionable clothes, a mockery of Man.

Then the angel scowled, confused and frowning. “Are you still drunk? Good lord, Crowley! You didn’t drive like this, did you?”

“I walked. Angel, pleassse. Let me in?” _I know you care about me. I know that’s what that thermos means. I’m begging you: hear what I’m asking you._

Aziraphale tutted and rolled his eyes. “You’re not a vampire, Crowley,” he said and swept his arm toward the bookshop, inviting him in the only way he could in such dark days, those end of days.

With narrow, heavy feet, Crowley tripped his way inside, catching himself on a display.

“Oh dear…” he heard behind him as Aziraphale locked up again. Then a wide steady hand pressed to the demon’s lower back.

Crowley bit his lip to keep from sobbing. He ran a messy hand beneath one side of his sunglasses, catching the tears before they too could fall. “M’all right,” he insisted, a bit sharply. “I’m _all right_.”

He wasn’t.

Aziraphale guided him to the east wing. “Can’t do more tonight, I’d think. Come lie down. Sleep this off.”

“Not the sort of thing you ssssleep off. World ending.”

Aziraphale sighed, and Crowley wasn’t sure if the exasperation was with the present situation of the doom-ridden demon’s legless arrival or the wider one of eleven years spent cancelling each other out over the wrong boy.

With firm patience, Aziraphale managed to bundle off Crowley to the sofa once more. “You’d feel better if you _sobered up_ , you know.”

Crowley sneered and dropped against the old familiar comfort of the worn-in cushions. “Not tonight. Give me tonight?” _I think I’ve earned it, failed my way into earning it._

For a moment, Crowley snagged the thread of himself against all the years with young Warlock Dowling. Treating the child as the tiny beloved royalty the demon believed them to be, while Aziraphale introduced gentleness, kindness, love. So many nights spent together like this one, but with surety of purpose. It had been a dream, a fairy tale, this one in another garden but of their own making.

It should have worked! It should have. They should have decades before Hell tried again, not days, hours, minutes before the war to end all wars.

How had he lost the Antichrist? How? He tore his glasses from his face and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. A keening moan simmered in his fire-branded throat.

Standing by the twisted wreck Crowley coiled himself into on the sofa, Aziraphale softened. “I’ll get you a blanket.”

The demon made a small noise of thanks, but the grip of guilt tensed at the base of his skull. Panic said he shouldn’t-have-come-back. He was-complicating-everything. _Don’t be kind. Toss me out. Throw me down._

He hid behind his glasses again. His skin itched with the need to stand and pace on aching legs, to circle Aziraphale and watch for predators.

But Aziraphale was there again, safe, and carrying an out-of-season eiderdown quilt that overwhelmed his arms. It was patterned in that tartan he’d loved for centuries, as if Crowley had expected anything else. It made him smile to see it. And oh, he needed that.

Aziraphale spoke as he draped the blanket. “Do let me know if this is too warm for you, dear, but I thought you might like the weight of it. I know it works wonders for me when I’m…”

“When you’re?”

Aziraphale delicately sat on the edge of the sofa, his kind eyes unfocused and elsewhere. “Well, when everything is a bit much, I suppose.”

There was a certain look about Aziraphale’s face that, if anyone knew to ask, Crowley would have said he’d seen ever so rarely. But as they’d known each other for so long, rarely became a relative term--and Crowley knew the sad smiling edges, the plea for compassion hidden in the dark corners of hazel-blue eyes. It had taken him time to recognize it, but he’d seen that look under the orange light of a very different Soho night.

With _that look_ again, Aziraphale brushed his hand over the blanket against Crowley’s chest. _My heart, my heart is there. Does he know it’s there? Right there? Always, wherever, whenever he touches me? You can reach in through my ribs, take it, it’s yours._

Azirapale didn’t hold Crowley’s gaze for long. Something akin to embarrassment crossed his cheeks with roses as he dipped his head away. Had he seen the desperate aching there hidden behind dark glasses, the demon’s lovesick eyes?

Crowley opened his mouth with bouquets of apologies behind his teeth, but the angel took a deep breath, filling his lungs with resolve. He smiled brighter when he looked back again.

“Let’s make sure you’re all covered, yes.” He tucked in the quilt’s edges in earnest, carefully snuggling it around Crowley like he was a small wild animal who might hurt itself.

 _Wouldn’t be wrong that,_ Crowley thought.

There was a moment where Aziraphale leaned across him, snuggling the blanket beneath his sides, his chest against the demon’s stomach and his curls close enough to kiss. If he hadn’t already been laying down, Crowley would have been a puddle on the rug.

Aziraphale straightened and appraised his work.

“Oh. Do you... want me to…?” He motioned to Crowley’s glasses.

The demon wiggled experimentally inside the cocoon Aziraphale had tucked him into, arms firmly secured. He sighed. “Mm-nn… Yeah? If you- Do you mind?”

Unbearably careful, Aziraphale reached down and plucked away the silver-edged glasses. Crowley bent his head to let the legs unhook from behind his ears. His foolish heart rioted in his chest from the barest whisper of two fingers grazing his temples.

_Aziraphale, Aziraphale, Aziraphale._

The glasses clinked softly against the end table as the angel set them beside their empty decanters and bottles.

“There. You know...” Aziraphale said, a conspiracy brewing in his voice.

Crowley turned hopeful eyes up to his angel.

“ _They_ might not notice right away. A-about Warlock. Not being the Antichrist and all that.”

“Nn-yeah?”

“Mmhmm. In fact, while you were gone, I was thinking that if no one’s come for you yet..?”

Crowley shook his head.

“Then there’s likely still time to get out ahead of it all. We might still avert the Apocalypse. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Crowley laughed miserably. “You are ridiculous,” he muttered without malice.

“In the morning.” Aziraphale smiled pat the blanket over the demon’s tumbleheart again before standing. “Since you insist on not sobering up, you should sleep it off. I’ll be near.”

Crowley silently pleaded through too loud golden eyes, _Stay close. Keep pressed against me so I know you’re here. Take off this blanket and cover me. I’ll cover you, too, if you’d let me. You’re all I need._

Though the faultline of his mouth trembled, he braced and tied down the shattering words until they were nothing more than a distant freight-train rumbling down the track of his heart.

Aziraphale turned on the record player, the melancholy pianos of Satie drifting on the nightstill air of the shuttered bookshop. Crowley untensed his shoulders with effort, as though the muscles there no longer knew how to be anything more than worked up sinew. But the music helped. And Aziraphale nearby did moreso.

The angel sat in his favored red-and-gold satin covered chair, a well-worn golden-covered book comfortably on his lap. Aziraphale turned a page and scooted his chair closer to the sofa.

The ending of the world shelved for a few precious hours, Crowley let his eyes slip closed. He nestled deeper into the quilt, allowing soft feathers and crisp, crinkling linen to hold his troubles for him where the angel wasn’t free to.

When Crowley finally slept, by some potentially literal miracle there were no nightmares. Instead, his dreams were of white wings sheltering him from the on-coming storm and a smile like sunlight to warm his hunted heart.


	9. The Third Alternative Rendezvous, 23rd August, 2019

Crowley had tried to sleep it all off. He’d done the best he could. He couldn’t directly involve himself or Hell would know. Hastur and Ligur would know. They’d both made it very clear that he wasn’t their favorite underling.

He’d met with a now Sergeant Shadwell. Long gone was the Corporal he’d left behind more than four decades earlier. The meeting had been… fine. He’d tried to stay focused, be mindful when the man asked about Crowley’s “father”, all hopeful tones and blue eyes swimming with fondness, asking more than the supposed-junior Crowley should have been able to see. If they survived Armageddon, he’d add that guilt to the endless pile.

But he was on the case, the sergeant was, though who knew how long it would take for the Witchfinder Army to come up with anything on the missing Tadfield boy.

Honestly, after contacting his respective agents, there had been nothing more Crowley could do _but_ sleep. Yet somehow, for one of the few times in his unending life, the demon just couldn’t.

Probably had something to do with Armageddon being one day away. Just if he had to guess.

He was jittery, practically vibrating out of his skin from the sense that he was missing some vital piece, that he could be doing more. He wanted to figure out what it was that needed doing, do it, and get back to life as normal. Which likely included a lot of actually-getting-to-sleep.

Normal also meant Aziraphale. He had put off calling the angel as long as he could, until he thought he might turn himself inside out just to stop feeling like a quaking mess.

They hadn’t parted on bad terms the evening before. They’d just… parted. After the halls of the former satanic hospital and the tree-choked roads of Tadfield, with Aziraphale talking about _love, flashes of love, peculiar feeling in the area_ , Crowley had almost driven the Bentley into a ditch. If that American gal hadn’t hit them, who knows where that conversation would have gone. Nowhere good.

The last thing they needed was to have a conversation about _love_ what with the world ending.

But, Satan below, Crowley had felt it too. Everything there was loved. The whole blasted area. And that meant he hadn’t been thinking entirely like a demon. He’d nearly done any number of things just to make Aziraphale gaze upon him, all open-heart and smile-shy.

He’d played it a little too coolly, miracling away the paint from the angel’s coat and his own skin--shot through the heart the moment they’d stepped through the arches of Tadfield Manor. Freaked out when the angel called him nice--nice, of all things! Him! A demon in that desecrated space that Satan Himself had once claimed! Who could have been listening still?

And to Crowley’s deep horror, that overwhelming, unchecked love had almost done him in. He’d had the angel pinned to a cross of light, spouting nonsense, wanting to kiss him and bite the trembling word _nice_ from those lips so the walls couldn’t hear it.

No. Love would only get them in trouble. But that didn’t stop Crowley from needing Aziraphale, his touchstone, his guiding star.

They needed to meet. They’d been at their usual haunt in the park too often so, when Aziraphale answered his call, Crowley said, “It’s me. Meet me at the third alternative rendezvous.”

“Is that the old bandstand, the number nineteen bus, or the British Museum cafe?”

“The bandstand,” Crowley huffed. “I’ll be there in fifteen.”

Like an angel’s wings on a wall, a bandstand shelters. But it does not protect.

Set in a remote corner of their park, Crowley climbed the short stone steps. His hips and knees throbbed, deceptively gentle. There would be a storm tomorrow. Fitting for humanity’s last hurrah.

Twilight brought few stars, the only one that mattered all dressed in creams and camels and midday sky, half-stepping with worry toward their meeting place, their common ground, neither day nor night, neither heaven-sent nor hell-torn. They’d walked this tightrope together so long. Their final act was set to dazzle. Win or lose? Catch or fall?

As Aziraphale fretted up the lamp-lit park path, it was practiced patience that allowed Crowley to wait rather than running to him, on edge with the need to know what was going on. Once the angel was closer, he saw the perfect wreck of the other being. Still, he forced his feet to take root on the stone slabs of the bandstand, dig deep, seek the soil, don’t scare him away, this flickering light.

 _He’d been fine at that cafe in Penge. Made a special detour just to go there for the Battenberg of all things. What happened?_ The ride back after the girl with the bike, they’d made their plan. It was the whole reason Crowley had even reached out to his old, er, acquaintance in the Witchfinders. But then they’d arrived at the bookshop and everything changed.

Crowley spoke first. “Any news?”

“Uh. What kind of news might that be?”

“Well, do you have the missing Antichrist’s name, address, and shoe size yet?”

Aziraphale chuckled, nervous. “Shoe size? Why would I have his shoe size?”

“It’s a joke.” Crowley admitted, none too pleased, “I’ve got nothing either.”

“It’s the Great Plan, Crowley.”

“Yeah. For the record,” Crowley said, pacing the octagonal confines of the bandstand and shouting toward the unseen and unlistening sky, “great pustulent mangled bollocks to the Great Blasted Plan.”

“May you be forgiven,” Aziraphale said softly.

Crowley whirled on the angel, feeling that gentle prayer like a slap. “I won’t be forgiven. Not ever. That’s part of a demon’s job description. _Unforgivable_ ,” Crowley damn near sang. “ _That’s what I am._ ”

“You were an angel once.” Aziraphale’s face threatened a timorous smile. His tone was too tender, and it leaked into Crowley, leached the warm colors from his old anger.

“That was a long time ago.” _Why bring that up? Do you want me to defect? I don’t think it works that way, love._ Crowley straightened his spine, as best he could. They had work to do. “We find the boy. My agents can do it…”

_Please, Sergeant, I know you don’t owe me anything…_

“And then what?” Aziraphale said, “We eliminate him?”

“Well, _somebody_ does. I’m not personally up for killing kids.”

Crowley knew that he couldn’t do it. Even if he thought he might be able to stomach the thought, Hell would know. His Lord would know. A demon who killed the boss’ kid? Right on the cusp of their assumed big win? They’d drop Crowley down a bottomless pit. They’d bury him in the sulfurous oceans. Draw and quarter him and pick their jagged teeth with the splinters of his bones.

But Aziraphale wasn’t thinking about that part. “You’re the demon. I’m the nice one,” he said. “I don’t have to kill children.”

“Uh-huh.” _Telling me I’m a demon, reminding me I was an angel. What are you even on about? The nice one! Like that’s the opposite of a demon or something. So what was all that about my being ‘nice’ back at the nun’s place?_

Crowley went to add to his argument but Aziraphale cut him off with tempered practicality. “If you kill him, then the world gets a reprieve. And _Heaven_ does not have blood on its hands.”

Crowley’s dark eyebrows shot high on his forehead. His indignation flared hot.

“Oh, no blood on your hands?” What were the innocents the Almighty had killed in their legendary temper tantrums? Bit of an unfortunate mess, perhaps? “That’s a bit holier than thou, don’t you think?”

Words clipped and posture stiff, Aziraphale said, “Well, I am. A great deal holier. That’s the whole point.”

“You should kill the boy yourself,” Crowley sneered, leaning in close. “ _Holy-ily._ ”

Through his teeth, Aziraphale said, “I’m not… killing… anybody.” 

Crowley dragged in a sharp breath. _Get it under control,_ he snarled at himself.

“This is ridiculous,” he said aloud, venting the boiling venom from his stomach. “You are ridiculous. I don’t even know why I’m still talking to you.”

“Frankly, neither do I,” Aziraphale bit.

And just like that, Crowley’s ghosts hooked their nails into his ribs and tugged. They dragged him back more than a century and a half to another argument in St. James. Another time when he needed Aziraphale and his friend wasn’t ready to listen, wasn’t ready to choose him. To trust him. He had needed time.

Crowley had sunk six decades to that fight, when the idea of losing each other had been so much farther away, on the horizon but a distant glimmer. No oncoming train they barely had time to jump away from.

 _I can’t be here. I can’t be here. I can’t be_ here _in this same park. With you talking to me like this, sounding like this. Not again, please, angel, not again. There isn’t time!_

“Enough,” Crowley said, more to himself than Aziraphale. “I’m leaving.”

One step. Two. Eyes ahead. Ignore how the legs aren’t working right. Get that throat in order and swallow down those sea-sick memories. This wasn’t the nineteenth century. _That was a long time ago,_ Crowley reminded himself. Look. See the electric lamps. Hear. The cars in the distance, no carriages clattering. Feel. _What am I feeling exactly?_

“You can’t _leave_ , Crowley! There isn’t anywhere to go.”

Crowley stopped mid-stride. Aziraphale’s voice was too soft, too sweet, too pained. _He’s… he’s not given up on me._ They were mirroring each other. In this together. _He’s just as scared as I am. Listen. Whose heart is stuttering and fluttering more?_

Aziraphale had said there was nowhere to go. _Oh, but I’ve thought about that!_

Crowley rounded again to his friend. Centered in the bandstand, he looked so lost. Bless it all, how he loved him, that soft angel who couldn’t even consider killing the literal Antichrist child.

The desperate demon gestured to the sky, sweeping, grand, the theatrics that he knew Aziraphale loved. “It’s a big universe,” he said, pouring his heart over his tongue. “Even if this all ends up in a puddle of burning goo, we could… go off together.”

_Please. Run away with me. Let’s write a different ending to Will’s play and find a way to survive this._

“Go off… together?”

He saw Aziraphale’s eyes twinkle with the possibility. For a moment, Crowley thought he would rush to his angel like he’d wanted to when he first arrived at the rendezvous. He would scoop him up and kiss that long-beloved face and tell him no one would ever hurt him, never again. All of those half-wit shits in Heaven had done their worst for a last time, and he would run with him forever so long as they were together. Together.

The moment passed.

Aziraphale glanced away, pulled back to whatever rhetoric gnawed at the raw curled edges of him. “Listen to yourself,” he said, sighing.

Crowley was listening. He knew exactly what he was saying! He’d been saying it for centuries, every time he’d found Aziraphale and done for him and chosen him. He chose him then, too, rallying toward the angel, not willing to let him hide, not when they were so close to being on the same page.

“How long have we been friends?” Crowley pleaded, “Six thousand years!”

“Friends? We’re not friends. We are an _angel_ . And a _demon_. We have nothing whatsoever in common.”

Sure, fine. Aziraphale had said these things before. Not with tears in his throat which Crowley could hear so plainly, but he recognized the walls for what they were: the angel convincing himself when he couldn’t be convinced. Crowley would have laughed, love spilling out in a bubble of hysteria, but he couldn’t dismiss Aziraphale’s concerns. That sort of reaction was fit for Upstairs. Oh, he understood his old co-workers in ways that his friend never could, the _disappointment_ and the _silence_ and the icy rivers of rage long after punishment had been meted out. But what did he know of how the choirs sang their lies since the Fall? If Aziraphale was terrified, it was for good reason. There was too much at stake for anything smaller than gut-deep horror.

But there had to be a way through. The world was counting on them. _Crowley_ was counting on Aziraphale.

The angel fidgeted, hands oddly slack at his sides. He cried as he turned away, “I don’t even like you.”

Crowley scoffed. “You _do_.”

“Even if I did know where the Antichrist was,” Aziraphale said, fever-pitched, “I wouldn’t tell you. We’re on opposite sides!”

Crowley advanced on the opening in the angel’s armor. “We’re on _our_ side.”

“There is no ‘our side’, Crowley!”

The declaration echoed in the small space, off walls that didn’t exist except in the bleeding chambers of their chests. The demon stilled. These words, that tone… They were new. Crowley didn’t like it.

Aziraphale added, gentler, more earnest, “Not any more.”

 _He means it,_ Crowley thought miserably. _No. No, Aziraphale…?_

Tears shone in the angel’s hazel-blue eyes. He glanced away. Aziraphale’s voice wavered as he said, “It’s over.”

A chill sunk through Crowley. There were ghosts on the wind.

 _It must_ be _bad. Otherwise you wouldn’t have tempted them into it._

_Still a demon then?_

Six thousand and twenty-three years.

_He’s not my friend. We’ve never met before._

_Do you know what trouble I’d get into if they knew I’d been… fraternising?_

Lifetimes upon lifetimes.

_Heaven will finally triumph over Hell._

_I’m an angel. You’re a demon. We’re hereditary enemies._

But there was no protection from two small words.

_It’s over._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one was especially hard for me to write on a personal level, hence the delay. I started and stopped so many times, careful of where I stepped. So if you are moved to such, please do feel encouraged to comment. Thanks for sticking with me! We're in the final stretch...


	10. Beyond the Bandstand, 24th August 2019

_No, that’s not how this was s’posed to work. I waited. I went slow. I waited. There wasn’t… There isn’t any more time!_

Crowley took a deep breath. He wanted to let his argument spill out, flood the continent that rose between them under the green and rose poles of the bandstand. His heart hoped even as it broke, imagined that he saw regret in the lines of Aziraphale’s face. But that was just projection, wasn’t it?

_It’s over, he said._

“Right.” Crowley stepped back instinctively. How was his angel giving up? _Not my angel. Not anymore, he said._ “Well, then. Nnn.”

He stumbled away, with all his words churning and scorching. He was going to throw up. He was going to sob. He was going to fall apart at the seams. Melt back into the red earth he’d crawled from and curl up in the blackest corner of Hell and hope that no one came looking for him for another eternity.

Crowley turned back before his foot hit the steps, a little less snap in his movements than he’d tried to throw into it.

_Want to make it better, but… I can’t. This hurts too much. Please, say something, ange- Aziraphale. Take it back, pleassse._

Every minute without Aziraphale--without the hope of loving Aziraphale, his best friend, the only one who understood, who Crowley knew cared about the world like he did--it wouldn’t matter where the demon went. All would be endless and black. A new living Hell.

“Have a nice doomsday,” he tossed out.

He was so very, very tired.

Crowley stalked out across the path, long legs taking longer strides. He forced himself to keep steady all the way to the Bentley. _Don’t look back. Don’t see how long Aziraphale stares after you. If he’s even looking at all. Stop silently begging him to chase after you. Hold you. Take it all back. Tell you we’ll find a way together._

Because there was no together. There was no _their side_. Not any more. Erased like it never started at all. Aziraphale had chosen Heaven. He’d picked those wankers and their Great Plan and their long-awaited rematch. Over humanity. Over him. Over the two of them.

He was on his own.

Crowley sat in the Bentley, not bothering to turn her on. The sun set for a final time and he didn’t so much as glance to note it, staring out as he was into the middle spaces, heart-emptied, panic-cold.

“So. Aziraphale doesn’t want to hang out any more. That’s my fault.” Crowley frowned, miserable. “Too fast. Again. Stupid, fucking arsehole... End of the bloody world and s-still getting it wrong.”

He collapsed against the steering wheel, eyes cast to the dome of the sky through the windscreen.

“War’s coming. _All_ the Horsepersons. Nothing left, is there? Yeah, you saw to that.” Crowley snarled, “There for the beginning, there for the end. Bump-buh-daah! Big finish now, boys!”

_Not with a bang but with a bandstand._

A fitful laugh burbled in his throat. The War to End All Wars was coming for them all.

“I won’t fight,” Crowley whispered, lower lip atremble. He covered his mouth, trying to stop, failing. “I won’t. Can’t make me.”

_So what? Stay in the car all night? Wait on some errand boy to come collect me once they find out about Warlock?_

_Oh… Oh, kid… I’m so sorry…_

Warlock Dowling was already on a plane headed to Megiddo in Israel. He was about to spend his last night with his distant father and his unsure mother. They’d let him keep Harry the Rabbit when the magician left him by accident and Mrs. Dowling couldn’t get in touch with the man. But there was to be no taking any sweet white bunnies on an international flight. The wrong boy had been quietly distraught over being dragged away from his new companion and his other fun birthday gifts, wondering why he needed to go with his parents on the boring trip in the first place. Warlock wished, for not the first time that week though probably the last, that his nanny hadn’t been away for a funeral.

It was going to be a very big wake. And none of the humans were invited.

The demon swallowed, throat dry. Parched. Could do with some water.

“No,” Crowley said definitely. “Not waiting on them. Can’t keep me here.”

He started the Bentley and drove into the nightblind streets with crumbling memories knocking about in his head. Every corner and lane, he’d walked these streets countless times. London had been his stomping grounds for the last thousand years, and for a thousand before that it was a small stone cottage in Wales. Oh yes, he’d watched the humans spread their roots to all corners from the start, but there on the great northern island, that had been his piece. Where he had chiseled and staked out a home.

If the world was ending in less than twenty-four hours, he wanted to _be_ home for it. Maybe he’d pull up a marathon and order too much food he wouldn’t eat--there had to be something he hadn’t tried with his ashen mouth--and he’d throw open his balcony door, play his music so loud the lady downstairs would call in a noise complaint. Yeah. That could do it. One last hurrah while the armies of Hell no doubt rallied and reveled.

_Miserable bastard._

Back at the flat, ‘twas the night before Armageddon and Crowley settled in for a long summer’s mope.

He removed his shades, his shoes, his jacket. He conjured up a spread of local menus, those what offered takeaway and a few that would find they suddenly did if the demon so chose. Lebanese, Cantonese. Oyster bar was out. He’d had all the modern British fare a dozen times over. French and Indian, he’d had all the best in the city and in their cities to wit. Asian-Italian fusions and burger joints and tapas. Why did none of it appeal?

His eyes hurt at the idea of further pouring over the menus. Crowley flicked on the telly and toppled into the seat of his opulent throne. Three episodes of _The Good Place_ went by--shifting, stretching his legs, adjusting position--and he began to wonder if he should have moved his leather couch into the room. His focus was scattered, swirling around desperate to follow the unintended consequences of modern complexity, how doing good could result in doing bad.

 _Pancakes_ are _starting to sound good, though..._

It was a damn shame he’d miss the final season. Him and all the rest of the world. Damn shame.

Nothing he could do about any of it.

He gave up on the show, content in knowing he’d never know how it ended.

Music, perhaps, to sooth the beast. Crowley had long taken deep pride in maintaining a state-of-the-art sound system. Oh yes, he would dearly love to let the waves wash over him and cleanse him of his rocky remains.

“ _There must be a way,_ ” crooned Frankie Vaughan, voice reaching out across five decades, “ _to help me forget that we’re through-_ ”

The vicious snap of Crowley’s fingers echoed through the flat and the silence that ensued, choking off the strings and brass.

_What’s the point of this? This dance? It’s all moot. You’re mot. You’re the walking dead. Ooh, maybe I should try that? Naw, no time to start a new show._

No time for anything. No need to write letters. Next of kin to take possession of the meager remnants of his life.

The safe behind the da Vinci sketch laid open. How did he even get there? Pulled by the siren song of the thermos, moved like a phantom, like a film skipping frames, drawing him inexorably toward _le fin_.

He remembered trying to touch the thermos two nights before. The whole of it gone too holy from recent events, it had seemed. Crowley miracled up elbow-length thick gloves and an apron in rubber, hoping that would do the trick. As he gripped the thermos carefully with the gloves, for the first time since he’d left the angel in the park, Crowley’s thoughts turned fully back to Aziraphale.

_Convince him._

Crowley hissed at himself. _Haven’t I pushed enough?_

_There might be a chance._

He was so tired of chasing after a life he couldn’t have. And though the angel’s name thrashed against the cage of his heart-- _Aziraphale, Aziraphale_ \--it only turned his lips to frown. His was a love locked inside, for only him to take out and admire the sad details.

“It’s over,” Crowley snapped. “There is no our side.”

He exhaled, a punched out sound as the truth hit him squarely.

“I am _alone_.” The weight was almost unbearable. “Yeah. Six thousand years, and I really… I really am.”

Strung across the arms of his throne, the demon washed his hands his face, sulfurous eyes widened to hold back the tears. But why did it matter? Why hold back?

He didn’t want to be alone. He didn’t want to watch television or annoy his neighbors. He wanted to be out there, with people. All the lovely doomed people with their too loud conversations, their squabbles, lives lived in a blink. And it was all getting cut off, snip!, just like that. No refunds or exchanges. No asking to see the manager and scathing tweets to follow. Hashtag Boycott the Almighty.

“Well, then. Fuck it. Is my last day. If I can’t spend it with, er, well, anyone, m’gonna do what I want. I guess? Sure. What do we wanna do, mate?”

There were many opportunities available to a demon in the urban swell of humanity, but one fact towered over them: all required going outside.

Resolved, Crowley puffed up his chest. “You can do this. One step at a time. Step one. Right. Put that blasted thermos back in the safe.”

The apron and the gloves were methodically set away in the bathroom closet next. Crowley watered the plants, telling them they were going to die but that they better not go wilting over it.

“I will _not_ have you embarrassing me, falling apart like a bunch of street corner roses, you hear? I’ll know… Ohh, don’t think that I won’t know.”

He threatened his green mister at one shivering aspidistra, whose leaves were lush and healthy. A glory unto him. Crowley hissed anyway, just for show.

That matter put to rest, Crowley organized his desk. Polished the red stone top. Straightened his little notebook just so. From his ansaphone, Crowley removed the compact cassette and replaced it with a fresh one. He would keep Aziraphale’s voice with him wherever he went.

With his charcoal sheets smoothed on his bed, he opened the blinds. Turned off the television.

Step two. He took a last look around his flat. It had been good to him over the years. Parties when he liked back in the day. Solitude when he didn’t. Mostly solitude. Space, quiet and clean, away from the dank and dinge of Hell. Crowley dragged a hand lovingly over stone wings of twined angels, across a glazed ancient pitcher once hung in a very different garden. He spared a smile for a stolen golden falcon.

But to an eagle lectern, reclaimed from the bombed out ruins of St. Dunstan-in-the-East one May night. Crowley entertained visiting the public gardens that stood there, one last time to see what bloomed out of those desecrated ashes, but ouch how it hurt.

Step three. Crowley grabbed his jacket, his glasses, his black leather key fob. He slid tired feet into his snakeskin boots.

As Crowley locked up, giving a last little boop to the serpent-shaped handle of his front door, he took a steeling breath. He waited impatiently for the lift instead of taking the stairs. No use aggravating his body any further. He’d had all the aggravation to last the rest of his earthly lifetime.

The demon sauntered out his front door, into the pitch of night, stars barely shining through the light pollution of the city. All of London lay open to his wiles and charms, unaware that it was the last night left for any of them to fight and fuck and dream and dance and drink and cry and stare into the faces of their loved ones.

Crowley exhaled deeply.

He climbed into the driver’s seat of his car. _Now where’s that all-night theater again?_


	11. Brewer Street, 25th August 2019

The forces of Hell were onto him.

Technically speaking, he hadn’t done what they’d thought he’d done. All of the ways he had tried to _prevent_ Armageddon had not panned out. He’d made a lucky mistake. His master’s son--and oh, it felt so wrong to think of Lucifer as his master--hadn’t gone to the American ambassador Thaddeus Dowling and his wife Harriet. That was an honest mistake. If the nuns had corrected each other along the way, the boy would have been Warlock. And Crowley had influenced Warlock toward the path of evil, in small ways. Instilled a sense of self and power and right. He’d done his job.

He just... hadn’t done anything to stop Aziraphale from thwarting his wiles.

It was really only the last seventy-two hours that the demon had gone completely off-book. He should have informed Dagon that the hellhound never showed. Any reasonable demon would have done so, taken their lumps, and been done with it until the Second Great War got rolling. But any reasonable demon wouldn’t have just spent eleven years playing nanny to a perfectly ordinary boy expecting that doing so would actually help foil their own side’s ambitions.

Hastur had found Crowley. Of course the duke had found him. Used the modern world’s technology like he always did and just ruined Crowley’s mood. Thankfully there were no children in the afternoon audience to develop nightmares from watching the bloody destruction of claymation bunny rabbits.

Hastur had gone to the Fields of Megiddo. He knew that Warlock was not the Antichrist.

 _Shit,_ Crowley thought, as he barreled through the streets of Soho toward Mayfair, _what did he do to the boy?_

He pushed the thought away. He couldn’t let himself think about what fiery end the frog prince had inflicted upon his former young charge and family. That way laid a terrible reality he wasn’t yet ready to contemplate. Not while driving. Maybe when him and Mary were safe among the stars. With his plants. And a few travel-sized mementos.

And his angel.

Whatever Aziraphale had said and thought he meant at the park, he was _still_ Crowley’s angel, still his best friend.

Crowley needed to get something from his flat first for insurance and then he’d back for him.

 _How many books will he want to take?_ Crowley mused, _He’s got to be fast. Not a lot of time. I’ll grab the Milnes while he gets his prophecies. Those all fit in a satchel before. Can’t be much more than that now, right? His housecoat and his little glasses. That eiderdown, I want it even if he doesn't. His mugs. I’ll get his mugs. And some cocoa. And tea. And the wine. Fuck. The boot’s going to be nothing but drinks, isn’t it? Where’m I gonna fit the gramophone and the records? Maybe I’ll just take one plant--one little bud, it’s all I’ll need so long as I have_ him _here. Here and happy._

_And safe from Hassstur._

Crowley cranked up the dial on Radio Four, attempting to shutter his thoughts. Only the Bentley was allowed to be racing anywhere right then. “...another chance to hear the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s musical selections on _Desert Island Discs_. And…”

The radio crackled ever so slightly.

The demon’s lips curled back. “Not again…”

“Crowley, the troops are assembled,” grumbled the announcer, slipping into the familiar half-amused sharp-toothed drawl of Lord Dagon. “The Four Beasts are riding. But where are they riding to?”

“Blessed if I know,” he whispered, weaving through an unexpected surge of traffic, halting and honking as pedestrians crossed in front of the sleek classic car. A southerly wind drew its breath deep, preparing.

“Something has gone wrong, _Crowley_. We trust you have a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this.”

“Absolutely,” Crowley said, distracted as he recognized where the car had taken him. “P-perfectly reasonable.”

Stuck on the one-way road as he was, Crowley couldn’t avoid passing the bookshop on the corner of Brewer Street while Dagon continued their harassment from the radio. “Your explanation, and the circumstances that will accompany it, will provide a source of entertainment for all the damned of Hell, Crowley.”

As he rounded the corner--avoiding direct eye contact with the old shop--he caught sight of white-gold curls bobbing in the crowd. What was that beautiful fool doing fretting about at a time like that?

More importantly: was he hawk or handsaw?

“Because no matter what agonies the damned are suffering, _Crowley_ ,” snarled the Master of Torments, biting each word before spitting it out, “you will have it worse. Crowley? Are you listening? _Crowley?_ ”

Without another thought, Crowley whipped the Bentley up to the pavement, scaring a few pedestrians and earning a stern shout from a nearby car. He threw wide the door, leapt free, and bottled the hellvoice within.

On winged feet, the serpent strode with cries of _Angel_ on his lips, turning heads to his distress. His shielded gaze saw only one. Crowley opened his arms to show he had no weapons, never ever with his friend.

“I apologise. Whatever I said, I didn’t mean it,” he supplicated, near babbling. He had to do this fast. For once, fast was what they needed. “Work with me, I’m apologising here. Yes? Good. Get in the car.”

He gestured to Mary. Their chariot awaited.

The fluttered string of words wound their way to Aziraphale’s ears, plumbing their depths. “What? No!”

“The Forces of Hell have figured out that it was my fault. But we can… run away together. Alpha Centauri.” He gestured wild, heavenward, far beyond. “Lots of spare planets up there! Nobody will notice us.”

He looked back to the angel, pained. He was trying. So damn much, he was trying. It was a perfect plan. What could be the hold up? They could take the Bentley and drive there. Years and years and years, just the two of them. A nice long road trip. Though where they were going, they wouldn’t need roads.

Aziraphale shook his head. “Crowley, you’re being ridiculous.”

There was no time to re-engage this dance.

“Look, I-I-I’m quite sure that if I can just--” The angel twisted in the wind as Crowley blanched at his speech. “Just reach the right people, then I can get all this sorted out.”

Crowley hurried to his friend, closing the distance, that damnable distance always between them. “There aren’t any right people,” he said gently. “There’s just _God_. Moving in mysterious ways and not _talking_ to _any of us_.”

“Well, yes, and that is why I’m going to have a word with the Almighty, and then the Almighty will fix it.” Wide grey-green eyes begged the demon to leave him to his inane plan. Oh, Aziraphale, how he believed those things like a child.

Because, of course, he’d never had the Almighty turn away from him. No, no, he was an angel still. After all they’d seen together! All those generations of death and despair, and the grace had never abandoned humanity’s first guardian. And he thought now? _Now_ would be when his mother returned a call? It broke Crowley’s heart, how belief pinned Aziraphale, breaking him upon the wheel of his faith.

“That… won’t happen,” Crowley cried, voice cracking. “You’re so clever. How can somebody as clever as you be _so_ stupid?”

A downward cast of Aziraphale’s eyes read plain the shock and hurt of Crowley’s words. His lips twitched at a frown that did not manifest on cue. Then his voice, too soft and final, said, “I forgive you.”

Benevolence rolled off the holy being like gut-shot to the demon. Aziraphale might have chosen not to be offended, but Crowley sure as hellfire was in his stead. Was he choosing Heaven? With all its bullies and false smiles? Those who’d sooner see the Earth crushed beneath their boots in the name of pointless dick-swaggering against their Fallen brethren?

_Is this my angel I see before me?_

A disappointed sound escaped Crowley, a sighing, “Oh…”

 _You’re going to get caught up in all this. It means_ you’re going to die, _Aziraphale. That’s impossible for me to bear beside you. Do not ask it of me._

He gave up. He gave up. What else could he do? On those Soho streets fifty-two years before, Crowley thought the angel had _hinted_ at a _maybe_ of a _promise_ of their future. When it came down to it--right down to it, the very last minute, their last chance, last day, even the last hours--Aziraphale ran to fix the abusers he knew instead of, well, instead of the uncertainty of whatever they could be on their own.

His friend could not see a world--a life--where choosing Crowley was ever the first option. And the demon was exhausted from trying to convince him otherwise.

More than that, too, a dispatch from Hell could bubble up from the edge of the shop’s wards any minute. And that simply wouldn’t do.

Crowley hurried back to his car.

“I’m going home, angel. I’m getting my stuff and I’m leaving.” Crowley jumped onto the Bentley’s running board, jostling the car. He succumbed to one last foray into melodrama and shouted his plan plainly. “And when I’m… off in the stars… I won’t _even_ think about you.”

It was a lie. One of very few he’d had occasion or need to utter unto Aziraphale in their long, long friendship. But it was a lie Crowley needed to say aloud, for the idea of the angel staying on Earth? Knowing he would get caught up in all of it?

_If I think of you here and the war to come... I shall surely perish._

Back within the Bentley’s embrace, Dagon was still talking. “-you understand me, Crowley? _Stay_ where you _are_. You will be... collected.”

The serpent ended the smug admonishment. Blissful silence followed and, in record time even for him, Crowley arrived at his Mayfair flat. After a once around the block of many-hued buildings contented him that he had no tail--and that it was unlikely anyone waited to get the jump on him--Crowley parked on the mottled brick drive of the complex where no one ever ticketed him nor blocked in Mary.

Snakeskin boots slapped the path and he flitted up to the tinted glass doors. His blood thrummed alongside the lift’s motor as he ascended to the top of the tower.

Inside his eastern-facing flat with its inexplicably palatial view, safe for a moment, Crowley checked the time: nearly two. “They’ll be here any moment…”

Having left the night before, he hadn’t thought about returning to the home he’d absentmindedly kept for most of the last century. He’d made his peace, said his goodbyes, assumed he’d have drowned his sorrows in several buckets of over-salted theatre popcorn right up to the end of it all. With Armageddon coming any hour, being back there in his den made him feel sheepish. He was an unfaithful lover returned upon daylight after promises of never again.

That wouldn’t do.

Crowley tucked his sunglasses onto the edge of his waistcoat and approached the rubber plant with the fattest, greenest leaves. He arched a brow as if to say, _Thought you were in the clear, didn’t you, eh? Didn’t think I’d be checking in on you out of the blue like this, hmm?_

He snapped up the mister, spritzed and paced. Paced and spritzed.

Aziraphale wasn’t coming along, but the agents of Hell were. Coming to drag Crowley away for what was sure to be an incredibly short presentation. Bottomless pits and sorting paperwork for eternity would be a best case scenario after what he’d pulled. Oh, sure, he’d get a bit of a reprieve if the forces of darkness got their war. But when that was all over? Step right up, boils and ghouls! One night only, live and in person: the Serpent of Eden takes the stage for his infamous tap-dancing routine. If you didn’t catch it back after the whole Eve eating the apple bit, you won’t want to miss his farewell performance.

He’d screwed up. Big time. Basically fucked off and done, well, Good for eleven years. Unintentionally. But sort of also on purpose.

 _If I don’t end up a living rug for Satan Himself at this point,_ Crowley thought as his plants quaked appropriately, _I might actually just be offended._

There was a way out, however.

Crowley crossed to his office, spinning the lazy wall out of his way. He set the green plastic bottle atop his desk. He took two steps toward the framed cartoon on his sleek grey wall before stumbling back, choking on waves of… of…

His eyes stung as he tried to swallow around the demanding tightness in his chest.

 _Aziraphale,_ urged his heart.

“No…”

_Aziraphale! Aziraphale!_

Crowley cried out as the snaking line of their connection unfurled across his memory, at last easing the shock.

Invitations for more time together. Another round of drinks, poured across the taverns, bars, and restaurants of their lifetime. Little shops in the markets and squares to explore. Plays and museums. Gardens and arenas. A thousand other places where they shared the awe of a world with such people in it.

People changed but they two remained. Just the two of them. All that they had of their own. Of comfort.

But it was so much more than merely time. It was familiarity, learning all the habits, the quirks and irritations. The impossible fussiness and arbitrarily held standards. Magic tricks that never went off. Prim little bow-ties favored over the last century. A gold ring fidgeting. That smile. That unamused glower.

The answer was there for Crowley, clear as the dawn that might never come again. In every pleasant afternoon discussion that had them bickering until they forgot what had riled them up in the first place and someone changed the topic to the newest gallery opening this or that, and another decanter came out from the backroom.

The gifts. The ones they could get away with, that no one would notice to suspect. The Arrangement, that it existed at all. A hand clutched tight to battle a sea of dread. Encouragement to wield against doubt. Gentle words. Too many soft-smiling thank yous for a demon to suffer. Let alone to follow after, puppylost among the praise and the worry.

 _If Hell found out,_ he’d whispered once, _they wouldn't just be angry. They’d destroy you._

Love. And he had missed it.

The rake of a gaze. _Oh good Lord…_

Love. And he’d seen judgement.

_Out of the question. It would destroy you._

Love and panic. Though Crowley had only known rejection, his own reaction a stinging slap.

_That was very kind of you…_

Love there, too, yes? And more riding on a leather bag passed between them, one finger brushing over Crowley’s hand. It had bowled him over, weakened his jangling skinnybone steps back to the Bentley. Chalked it up to his own blubbering heart, he had.

_Crowley, it’s too dangerous._

Love in the red lights of Soho.

_The holiest._

Love in a tartan thermos.

_We could, I don’t know… Go for a picnic._

“Dine at the Ritz,” Crowley sighed through a choppy breath. Those ghosts had haunted his halls, shivering and weeping, and all along… Aziraphale loved him.

Aziraphale had given him that thermos and the weapon inside it. It was his way out, but _not like that_. Even if they never saw one another again, he would not pervert such a gift nor break his friend’s trust.

He swallowed down the bile of trembling doubt.

“N-no.” Crowley dragged the back of his hand across his tearing eyes. He took a cooling breath. “Not giving up on this. On... Az-Aziraphale. On _humanity_.”

He shot a scrunch-nosed leer upward and cherished that the Almighty should ever catch it.

Despite everything, Crowley wanted to keep living. There, in his Mayfair flat. And in London. He wanted to live and he wanted to keep enjoying all the habits he loved. He wanted to annoy the humans for another six millennia. Watch their movies and taste their food. Hear their voices lift, see them build and create. He didn’t want any of that to end. Not for himself and certainly not for them.

Not for Aziraphale, either.

He’d started the whole Antichrist debacle trying to save everything for the both of them. He couldn’t stop. Deny it all he liked, Crowley’s hope was evergreen. He’d just lost sight of what was important for a while.

Crowley had never been a soldier built for head-on competition, rules, fair fights. But he was a scrapper. Clever, imaginative. Sly enough to fool his enemies; witty enough to keep one step ahead. On his phone, he prepped up his home number for redial just in case.

He caught sight of the time.

“Hell is coming for me,” he said with finality and slid on his shielded Valentino’s.

Crowley strode urgently toward the kitchen. He was going to need a bucket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [AUTHOR’S NOTE: Much of Dagon and Crowley’s exchange is taken from a cut scene in the script book. I wish we had it in the show but totally understand the pacing and tension needs. I wanted to bring it here for those who might not have read that scene!  
> Also, I scanned for freakin’ ever the maps of Mayfair trying to find what buildings might correspond with the ones outside Crowley’s flat, visible when we see his windows. But they’re the Houses of Parliament--the Palace of Westminster. So… that's a thing we all know now. And either he isn’t in Mayfair, putting him on the opposite side of the Thames of what’s out his window (and… basically where a hospital is) and much farther away from Aziraphale… or he just likes the view and that’s what he sees when he looks out the window I guess.  
> Furthermore... I spent far too long finding the outside of his building for like two bits of description. In reality, it’s not in Mayfair, but there is an art studio on the first floor with RAINBOW signage. And the pair of buildings in this plaza are also RAINBOW. So what I'm saying is, Crowley's *in the family* and even his flat thinks we should know it.  
> ONE CHAPTER TO GO. I'm going to try to be faster on this one than the last. Thanks for being here through. As always, comments are jolly helpful. Make everyone on stage feel appreciated. ^_^ I hope you're all doing okay and are safe, and if not that at least you're keeping pleasantly distracted.]


	12. St. James Park, East End, 1862

It wasn’t unusual for the ducks to see one man without the other. Over the years, and indeed for generations unknowable to the meager memories and storytelling traditions of waterfowl, the ducks often partook of offered oats from the slimshadow one without the accompanying bread crumbles and seeds from the downy one. What felt odd indeed for the ever-hungry lake dwellers, however, came about in _how long_ Crowley stood at the black iron fence. His pockets were presumably empty. Though it was the clever mallard indeed who’d first learned that _sometimes_ \--if their greedier, faster teammates gobbled up all the good bits--there was just a sprinkling more all for them. But even after the big bells rang in the hour and their sord tried again, the ducks went unrewarded.

For his part, the demon Crowley hadn’t noticed the consternation he’d kicked up among his feathered acquaintances. His serpentine eyes drifted over flower-footed ducks and regal swans, mallards and pelicans, all equally unseen.

He was brooding. A champion brooder, he was at the height of his skill there in the center of Victorian London, all long tall lines and stormcloud clothes foreboding. He could brood all morning if it came down to it, though he knew his companion would not leave him waiting. Crowley was an hour early to their meeting on purpose, intent on leeching the roiling emotions out of his system before anyone peeked under his corners.

A false hope but a hope nonetheless.

Aziraphale approached, on time as expected.

The demon took a thin breath and stared ahead, gaze hooked onto the black swan swimming to its white-feathered mate. He’d heard the humans observed swans mated for life, but all Crowley ever saw of the long-necked birds and their courtship dance seemed to involve an awful lot of hissing and preening. He couldn’t understand what some wing flapping and synchronized head-bobbing indicated about any creature’s life-long compatibility.

Beside him, the angel didn’t pause to greet Crowley before casually removing his gold-ribboned top hat--beaver fur was _several_ decades out of fashion compared to Crowley’s own shellacked black silk. Inside the crown of the hat, Aziraphale had wedged a crust of bread. Crumbs speckled his white-gold hair, those curls far fluffier than his felted hat.

Crowley’s fingers twitched in their red-stitched gloves, convulsing around a scrap of paper and the hardwood walking stick in his arms. He couldn’t brush away the bits of bread. That would be touching. They couldn’t.

Standing by the lake as they were, two feet apart and gazing ahead, Aziraphale could have been a very rude stranger. Only the ducks knew any better. The ducks and Crowley.

It had been good since Paris and _good_ wasn’t something Crowley ever felt safe enough to keep. What he and Aziraphale shared was all the more precious for it. He needed to protect them both from the green-eyed Iagos of Hell with their tearing hands and gristlegrinder teeth.

Crowley cut into the conversation neither of them were having. “Look, I’ve been thinking. What if it all goes wrong? We’ve got a lot in common, you and me…”

“I don’t know,” said Aziraphale. Distant. “We may both have started out as angels, but _you_ are fallen.”

Ahh. It was to be one of those conversations then. Corporate lines drawn. Crowley twisted his lips. It was all so long ago, he thought it shouldn’t matter. Especially when they’d been in agreement for over eight centuries.

The demon had convinced himself of many things in that time.

“I didn’t really fall. I just, you know, _sauntered vaguely downwards_.” Crowley didn’t want to talk about that, though. Who knew when he might screw his courage to a sticking-place again. Quickly, he added, “I need a favour.”

“We already have the Agreement, Crowley. Stay out of each other’s way. Lend a hand when needed.” Aziraphale sounded testy. Did he suspect why he was asked to meet?

“This is something else. For if it all goes pear-shaped.”

Aziraphale frowned. “I like pears.”

With fond nostalgia dripping from the angel’s lips like juice, Crowley knew that Aziraphale got what _it_ he was talking about. “For if it all goes _wrong_.” Gently, he said, “I want insurance.”

His heart drummed faster. The side shields of his smoky-glassed railway spectacles hid each time he glanced askew, keeping Aziraphale from suspecting his caginess.

The angel shook the crumbs from inside his top hat before returning it to his head. “What?” he asked, as if only just hearing Crowley.

“I wrote it down. Walls have ears.”

To his friend, he passed over the note he’d been worrying in his gloved hands, impressed when he did not shake, did not drop the paper past the gate at the water’s edge.

Crowley swallowed but words tumbled from him unbidden, correcting. “Not walls. But trees have ears. _Ducks_ have ears.”

Aziraphale opened the folded parchment.

“Do ducks have ears? Must do. S’how they hear other ducks.” He could see as much as feel the edges of himself shaking apart.

At last, an answer arrived.

“Out of the question.”

Desperately, foolishly perhaps, Crowley had hoped to avoid this dance. Low voiced, the demon came back, “Why not?”

“It would destroy you,” Aziraphale pleaded. “I’m not bringing you a _suicide pill_ , Crowley.”

Crowley felt the angel watching his profile, looking for more. He couldn’t--couldn’t stand to turn and face rejection. “That’s not what I want it for. Just… insurance.”

_I can’t say it aloud. It’s so hard to even ask, let alone twice. Please! You’re the only reason I’m asking for this._

Aziraphale straightened. “I’m not an idiot, Crowley. Do you know what trouble I’d get into if they knew I’d been… fraternising?”

Crowley startled.

Fraternising?

The word echoed in his ears. The implication that they were _still enemies_ finally did get him to turn. He fumbled to obfuscate his wounds, sneering to cover.

Aziraphale added, “It’s completely out of the question.”

“ _Fffraternising?_ ” Crowley managed.

“Ohh, whatever you wish to call it,” said Aziraphale, dismissing him out of hand. “I do not think there is _any_ point in discussing it further.”

Aziraphale was closing off. End of discussion. Fuck. It was Wessex but worse. Personal. Crowley had recklessly let himself believe that Aziraphale, _the enemy_ , saw them as more than their respective sides.

What had all the luncheons been since the bookshop opened? Did their endless easy evenings mean nothing? The letters exchanged, sealed and perfumed? The damn near promenading in the park? Where they had their own routines and the… _The blessed_ ducks _know us on sight!_

Why had Aziraphale always neatly pressed the simple seasonal blooms Crowley gifted him? Why keep them between delicate sheets of paper tucked safely out of sight on the second floor of the shop, that space where only they were allowed?

Eight-hundred and forty-sum years since they’d come to their agreement-- _It was forty-two, who’m I kidding, I’m definitely counting_ \--and he was the saddle-goose who thought they were in it together.

Staring, bitter, Crowley taunted, “I have lots of other people to _fraternise_ with, _angel_.”

Aziraphale huffed. “Of course you do.”

“I don’t need you.” Crowley blinked, eyes stinging.

“The feeling is mutual.” Aziraphale’s lips thinned. “Obviously.” Then he threw the hateful little slip of paper into the pond and stormed off.

An instinctive miracle from the demon and all proof of the absolute hardest question he’d ever had to ask went up in flames. He mocked, “ _Obviously_.”

Minutes faded in and faded out. Each without Aziraphale. Crowley stood by the fence, working on his breathing.

A pair of ducks waded towards him, taking to land with an insistent series of quacks. Crowley had known them since they were ducklings, swimming with their brothers and sisters. On any other day, he would have conjured up a handful of oats before he left. On any other day, he would have felt generous.

On any other day, he would not have scoffed and scolded, “What? What do you want? I don’t _have_ anything. I don’t…”

He trailed off, hands taut around the metal snake atop his walking stick.

He didn’t have oats. He certainly didn’t have a promise toward safety as the End Times raced closer. And because he had asked, Crowley learned he didn’t even have one friend in all the world.

Miserable, he whispered, “I don’t have _anything_.”

Undeterred by the existential crisis swirling inside their mark, the ducks _pap-papped_ closer, hunger hopeful and routine daring.

Crowley hissed, lips curling. He let slip a flick of his snake-bitten tongue.

The fowl scurried off from the sound and fright, solving the demon’s question of ears in the process. It didn’t fill his thirst for knowledge in the least. Asking was dangerous, after all, and answers could be terrible.

Carriages clattered behind him, bringing that horse smell everywhere in the city these centuries. A wheel came loose at Crowley’s displeasure, the carriage crashing. People shouted, frustrated. Blaming each other.

“That’s on me,” the demon sighed and held his hands tighter. He had to get himself under control.

He had stood there until nightfall after that, failing to decide what to do with himself. To his fashionable home, he had stalked the lamplit streets alone. Into his indulgently comfortable bed, he had collapsed. And he stayed there for decades, dreaming, building courage in fits and starts, losing it in equal measure.

Until it was time to get up and go about the city. Cause a bit of flashy mayhem. Sow a little havoc. Fall in love with a car.

Save an angel from embarrassing himself.

Crowley knew what he’d tried for in the park. For most of the nineteenth century, he’d worked himself up to it, the asking. He’d tried writing long explanations, the letters of his script curling neatly. Several stacks of paper had met their final end after his hand trembled, smearing the lines, splattering the ink, giving him away. It had delayed his quest by nearly half a year alone. Until all he could manage were two words, the important ones.

Yes, he knew why he’d asked for holy water and what it meant he’d threaten some day, soon or never: not just hurting another Fallen--someone as cast aside as Crowley himself--but completely destroying them.

If he’d been luckier, Duke Hastur might have walked through that door first. Instead, all that remained of Duke Ligur, He Who Walked the Sourceless Winds, was a pile of crusted-over clothes pooled beneath the archway of a lesser demon’s earthly office.

Aziraphale’s voice floated in the moonless dim. “You used it.”

“Hrm?”

It was past midnight. Sunday, the day after Armageddon, if he was being technical. September had loomed in on them without so much as an apology.

Crowley was bone tired from a day he’d dreaded in ways since he first slithered up into Eden. The memory of that day was sweet petrichor and apple skins; where this one had soaked in the tarstick creosote of red leather and a lifetime of papers, too, bound and stacked by the hands of an angel. When he closed his sulphur-dust eyes, the walls of flame burned there still, the mundane more hateful than the hellish.

Aziraphale spoke again. “I assume that was _someone_? Once?”

Crowley hesitated in the entrance, peering beyond his friend into the office. He’d played a dangerous hand there that afternoon. An all or nothing round. Hastur’s white wig lay limply on the red marble desktop, a skinned beast, his unwanted prize.

He took an extra breath, enough to sigh deep and long. “Ligur. N’yeah. Not a bad sort, really,” he explained as he continued down the hall. Had to get the kettle on. Or something stronger more like. “Just doing his job, I suppose? Like the rest of the poor sods.”

“Like the rest of them. Yes.”

Before Crowley could suggest otherwise, Aziraphale crouched beside the duke’s remains. He prodded one well-manicured finger at the crisp black trench coat on top.

“It’s not holy anymore,” said Aziraphale with relief. “If you’d like I can--”

“Naw, I got it.” Crowley came back with a quick stride.

“Really, it’s no-”

“Not holy, you said, yeah? Good. I’ll do it.” He’d deal with his guilt perhaps never. Crowley then added, impossibly mild, “It should be, you know, _me_.”

“Hell sent him to fetch you then?”

“With Hastur, yeah.”

Aziraphale stepped aside. He ventured into the office with deliberate steps, his brogues tapping neatly on the concrete. Crowley could tell his friend was circling toward the tartan thermos there beside the ansaphone and the wig, the rubber gloves and the apron, the little box of secret tapes with only one voice on them.

Crowley hovered by the pile in his doorway, considering how to handle it. When he’d murdered his fellow demon and even before when he’d thought of what the blessed water would do, his plans had never included this part. Charging into the fray didn’t come easy to him, never had, but cleaning up his own messes? That was a whole new level.

What was respectful? Or properly demonically disrespectful? He could miracle it away. Get a rubbish bag perhaps? Wasn’t the sort of thing one threw out where any human might get their hands on it, but calling next of kin seemed, er, ill-advised. If Aziraphale wasn’t there, Crowley might have left the spot for a decade before he got over his shame enough to handle it.

In front of him, Aziraphale reached out until his fingers brushed the glossy metal exterior of the thermos. The look on his face, which Crowley caught with a furtive glance, told stories; reverence and surprise among them. It had been more than fifty years since the angel laid eyes on his gift. Likely he never expected--or perhaps hoped never--to see it again. Certainly not so soon.

Aziraphale whispered, “They’ll be coming for you again.”

Crowley swallowed tightly, not ready for the conversation. Couldn’t have put it off forever, sure, but he could feel the wave cresting of their having pointedly ignored the elephant in the room. They’d managed an entire bus ride from Tadfield without bringing it up. Not saying anything, in fact.

Crowley had had lifetimes of not saying many things with Aziraphale beside him. On park benches and carriage rides. In darkened theaters.

In those close-set bus seats that evening, there had been no pouring out of long-held emotions. Crowley had distinctly not said anything about how he held his friend’s hand to prove that the angel was there with him again. And the demon did not ask to slip his fingers between the angel’s own lest he bury his face in that tip-top condition coat and inhale the familiar cologne. His thumb had circled distractions along the warm skin of Aziraphale’s knuckles, saying, pay no attention to what the left hand does. Let those plucked tears vanish unseen. _Magic!_

They didn’t speak on the bus except to notice the approach of the low London skyline, and the turn up Crowley’s street. There had been theatrically polite doorholding and directing Aziraphale to the lift. An attempt at levity by his door, about it being a miracle he still had his house keys.

 _Wish I could keep this safe-harbor longer,_ he thought gloomily. But the time for quiet fantasy was over. The folks Downstairs in Accounting would fast-track a swift reckoning upon him.

“Suppose so,” Crowley said to Aziraphale and grabbed the pit-stinking clothes indiscriminately. “Answer for this _and_ the airbase.”

“My side--ah…” Aziraphale removed his hand from the flask and tucked his arms behind his back. “My _former colleagues_ will likely do the same.”

The floor lurched beneath Crowley’s feet. “Nwh- No?”

Aziraphale raised his eyebrows.

“They can’t?” Crowley cried, “Y-you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Doubtful Gabriel sees it that way.”

Crowley promptly threw down the Ligur leftovers, indignant. “You were going to shoot him,” he pleaded in his approach as if to a jury he could sway. “The Young boy. The Antichrist. You’d have done it!”

The angel didn’t deny it. But after a moment, he said with some wider understanding than Crowley could muster, “Testing them. The humans. She was testing them.”

“They can’t take you,” Crowley snarled. He managed to hold his heart inside his chest long enough not to say _from whom_ Heaven couldn’t take the angel. “Don’t care how many of them try.”

“That’s very kind of you to say but not very practical, is it?”

Practical? What, if anything, over that past week could either of them call practical? Crowley was exhausted from just how _im_ practical every minute had felt since at least Thursday morning. Fumes didn’t do justice to what he’d been running on. He’d panic-stitched his own mind together through the ideation and the break-ups and the bookshop burning down around him and the Bentley as well. Those earthly possessions were gone but an angel and a demon, they were still there.

Couldn’t that count for something?

“I’ll watch over you,” Crowley said as he crowded closer in the dark room.

 _You deserve to be here, so let me just take my good fortune and hope no one comes to check the balances._ “Every minute. You… They can’t.”

A heaviness hung between them, charged and raw. He was a hair's breadth away from taking the angel into his arms and whisking them both away to some far off planet, forgotten to time and archangels both.

But then his friend turned away, with a sorrowful, “Oh, my dear boy.”

His ears began to ring. Crowley removed his Valentino’s, set them atop the apron, and rubbed the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Please, Aziraphale. Please. I am _not_ losing you again. Everything would have been all right and I went to find you. But you weren’t there. You... _You weren’t there!_ And I didn’t- There wasn’t anymore… No. You’ve only just-”

The stream of Crowley’s words dried up with a steady hand cupped against his stubblebranded cheek. More than the touch, which his skin drank jealously, it was the feather-soft waves of love coming off those riverbed blue eyes that dropped Crowley. He sank against the rocky shores of his desk, a wreck in the light of Aziraphale.

“Hh…”

“I know,” Aziraphale said but Crowley knew he couldn’t possibly. “We’ll sort it all out. Together.”

The demon’s chest ached from the weight of the emotions, pouring and filling every corner of him with that familiar staccato he’d felt from the thermos all those years. A strength returned to him with those memories and Crowley leaned into the touch with a sigh of pleasure upon his lips, calling, “ _Angel._ ”

Aziraphale turned up a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. His voice cracked, “Our own side, yes?”

The words left unspoken scorched Crowley’s veins. “You don’t know that I know,” he said, lips curling. “I can _feel_ it, Aziraphale.”

The angel hummed thoughtfully. “What’s that?”

“Y’said it was the holiest.” Crowley gave a languorous nod toward the thermos beside him but his open gaze stayed fixed on that face most beloved. “You did it. Made it special. Just for me. Yeah?”

Aziraphale cleared his throat with sudden nervousness. “What? Oh! It was a long time ago…” He was clearly hoping not to need to continue.

“I can feel it now,” Crowley added. “From you. And not just flashes.”

Aziraphale’s fingers hovered away from Crowley’s cheek. “Ah, but you’re practically falling asleep on your feet aren’t you. Perhaps you should rest? I seem to recall you have a rather modern-looking piece that thinks it’s a sofa somewhere around here. I-I-I’ll make do with that.”

Instead of calling out Aziraphale’s highly telegraphed dig on his interior decorating choices, Crowley caught the angel’s fluttering hands as he tried to walk away and avoid his revelations.

“Stay.” He kissed his devotion to the angel’s knuckles.

“Crowley, please,” Aziraphale began, a delicate request not to sail the uncharted waters ahead.

But he couldn’t leave it unsaid. Not with their futures so tremulous. Facing Aziraphale as he led him across the office, Crowley walked backwards into his garden. “Stay with me.”

Trusting, though a bit resigned to it by his own heart, Aziraphale followed. He glanced at the shivering plants but Crowley tugged him away from the distraction and toward the gray-sheeted slab of a bed that dominated his room through a smoky glass wall.

“Just stay close to me tonight,” Crowley said, turning down the sheets with a snap. “That’s all I ask. Nothing else.”

Aziraphale’s eyes flickered from Crowley to the inviting comfort of his bed and back again. His shoulders relaxed.

He squeezed Crowley’s hands. “That sounds lovely.”

And so Aziraphale stayed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [There will be a short epilogue to follow. If you’re very good, I’ll finish and share it by the end of the month. The rating on this fic remains T for Teen. How good have you been?]


	13. EPILOGUE: Crowley’s Flat in Mayfair, September 1st 2019

In the beginning, there was love and it was good. When the end came, the world was granted a reprieve because it simply was too full of the stuff to give up then.

Safe beneath the sheets with Aziraphale nestled pleasantly sitting up beside him--one rawboned knee barely brushing a soft thigh, a hand on his pillow close enough to flex fingers and touch the nearby arm--Crowley shut his eyes and relaxed. He hadn’t done that since spending the night on the angel’s sofa and, oh, he needed to unwind something awful. He drew in a breath, filling the empty spaces of his chest with permission. Slow down. It was all right. For now, it was all right. They had fended off the apocalypse. Or, well, they’d helped at any rate. And the two of them were safe in his flat. After what had happened to the last demons to storm his little castle, Crowley doubted Hell would be keen to risk a repeat.

Tomorrow was for tomorrow-Crowley to deal with. Which, if Aziraphale hadn’t lifted his arm and encouraged the flagging demon to lay against him, Crowley might even have been able to ignore that information enough to sleep. But the angel did lift his arm. And he did cast a plaintive glance from Crowley’s side of the bed to his own, cheeks rosy in anticipation of an answer.

Crowley choked on his response. Instead, he slunk over the inches close enough until Aziraphale pulled him to his chest.

The serpent’s mind blanked.

All attempts at thought burst out of Crowley in one heavy breath, his world narrowed to the rise and fall of Aziraphale’s chest and the steady beating of his heart beneath the velvety softness of his old waistcoat and his arm hooked over Crowley’s shoulder.

Several long moments wrapped around the two in the cool little nest, their only eavesdroppers a particularly long-lived cast-iron plant and the nosy rubber plant across the way.

Aziraphale broke the silence, gently saying, “I can move my arm if you’re uncomfortable.”

Lightning fast, Crowley grasped at the hand on his shoulder and tugged it tighter to him. “Don’t you dare.”

With that, the angel settled his free hand atop Crowley’s head--fingers combing into the half-curling firebranded tresses--and sank into the pillowy mattress, seeming right chuffed about the whole set up.

_He hasn’t got any books to keep him occupied,_ Crowley reasoned, fighting his instinct to lean into the touch. Then he laughed a little to himself. _That really all it would’ve taken these last two centuries?_

“Hmm. What’s that?”

“Nothing. I-” _Love you. Terribly. It’s all-consuming at times, this crushing weight I carried across lifetimes. Bound it up. Took it with me into the fire, too. Thought I left it there. Thought I lost it. Lost you._

Aziraphale squeezed one hand against Crowley’s arm, only the long sleeve of his henley keeping it from sending further shocks to his system. Simultaneously, the demon was grateful and regretting that they’d each stripped away their excesses before gathering in the bed. Gone were jacket and coat, and boots both Balmoral and Chelsea. If Crowley hadn’t known before the unpleasantness of his belt’s snakehead digging into his stomach while he slept, that would have stayed for the sake of expediency. Onto the function-over-form bed table, Crowley had dropped the twin metal accouterments from around his neck alongside the watch and chain from the angel’s waistcoat, silver coiling protectively over gold. His old watch and his shades had gone with them for good measure.

So although they laid there--two ethereal beings fully dressed by human standards in shirts, waistcoats, trousers and socks--it had been pure eternity since the serpent of Eden had felt so exposed.

He knew Aziraphale loved him.

More than anything, Crowley wanted his friend to know he felt the same but he couldn’t possibly say it. Not yet. Too much uncertainty. Not from Aziraphale but from all the forces that might lurk ahead intent on terminating their employment. Workplace censure being what it had for their lifetimes, Crowley was excellent at hiding emotions, less so on sharing them.

_Perhaps,_ he thought, _you see_ how _I say it to you, at least?_

Crowley shut his eyes, choosing not to chase swirling thoughts at the edge of his vision and instead to bask in Aziraphale’s touch. He couldn’t be sure anyone had run their fingers through his hair like that since before the Thatcher Administration.

“I-I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through today,” Aziraphale said, long after Crowley had decided that he could drift off laying like that. “I’ve worried about it myself a fair bit, you know. Losing _you_. That is, that you would--”

“I get it,” Crowley whispered, a mercy. They didn’t need to say it. It hadn’t happened.

He gazed up and raised his fingers to the angel’s face, the pads seeking the pulse-loving neck of him, thumb alighting for one feathering brush along stubbled cheek and jaw.

“Yes. Quite.” Aziraphale drew in a stuttering breath, the sound worrisome to the demon against his chest. But when Crowley withdrew his touch, it was the angel’s turn to stop him and leaned into his palm. “It was probably selfish of me, giving you that, but I don’t regret the choice. I simply couldn’t bear it if you’d been hurt robbing that church.”

“Aww, I robbed plenty of churches,” he said, dragging on bravado.

“Getting a _dangerous_ weapon?”

“Nn… No.” Crowley blushed furiously before admitting, “Books. For you. Bibles you wanted, mostly.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said slowly, “well then. We’re going to _talk_ about that some time in the future I suspect.”

Crowley muttered, nonchalant, “Just left them around the shop for you to find. Didn’t want to make a big deal of it.”

The sigh that escaped Aziraphale dripped with fondness. “Thank you for being here.”

“What, in bed? Or just in general?”

“Yes? All of it. Being here _still_. After everything they put us through. Every silly unthinking word I said that probably wasn’t very kind of me.”

“Oh. Um, yeah, you know. No problem. Don’t even think of it.” Crowley’s throat tightened. He was trying not to get overly emotional, couldn’t Aziraphale appreciate that?

The angel laughed though, and the love rolled off him in peals, sticking under Crowley’s tongue to melt like candyfloss, much much too sweet. Oh, he couldn’t help himself. Couldn’t stop it. The burbling brook tripping over the carefully laid rocks to steady him. No, they washed away and sent Crowley burying his head against Aziraphale’s stomach to drown the sobbing edges of him.

“Ohh,” said his friend and those strong arms wrapped him in a tight embrace.

To be so loved. All those years and before. _How long?_ It didn’t matter how long. It only mattered that it was true.

Aziraphale soothed a line down Crowley’s back, holding him through another soundless keening as the demon pushed all the air from his lungs and then some. If he could just rid himself of the sick of it, maybe he could breathe again, get his cool again, pretend this was not more than he ever thought he could deserve. Him. One of the Fallen. Despised in the eyes of Heaven. Yet loved by the most truly angelic of their chorus.

He didn’t deserve it. He didn’t know how to accept it.

Was it he fucking it all up even having those thoughts?

Crowley struggled to sit up, swallowing thick and shaking. Aziraphale followed him.

“I’m fine,” said Crowley as he dug the heels of his palms to his sun-seeking eyes. “Fine. It’s fine.”

Above the shell of Crowley’s ear, Aziraphale whispered as he wrapped his arms around the demon’s ribs, “I almost gave it to you in the forties.”

“N-ng.” Surely, the angel didn’t mean what Crowley thought of immediately--mind where it was that moment--so he slurred out more than a little high pitched, “Whassat?”

“The, um, the holy water you requested?”

The forties. A lot had happened in the most recent forties. What had…

Crowley lit up. “Oh! After…?”

“ _After._ Yes.”

The words drizzled down Crowley’s spine like honey, pooling along the phantom flames of his soles’ memories. “Ohh,” he purred, self-satisfied.

_The church._ It was a public gardens those days. Crowley had had quite a lot to do with its conversion in the late sixties, and more than enough of the plants quivered out of old habit when he walked by. Did Aziraphale know then? Had he been? Would he want to see? The demon hoped he could show his friend if not for the first time then with a new appreciation, to know it meant so much to him as well.

“Not that I’m not grateful--I am, obviously. Wouldn’t be here if y’hadn’t but…” Crowley adjusted in Aziraphale’s embrace enough to watch him, which might have been a terrible idea as then Aziraphale could watch him back. “Why give it to me at all?”

Aziraphale studied him, eyes dark in the grey room. A smile curled the corner of his lips like a vine set to climb the demon. “You are so good, Crowley.”

He pouted his mock displeasure, though a seed of warmth spread across freckled cheeks.

Aziraphale continued. “All you did was protect me. Admittedly, it took me some time…”

_One hundred and five years,_ Crowley thought, mournful for the lost time though without the old bitterness.

“But I caught up to you,” Aziraphale said and leaned against him in what was almost but not quite a nuzzle. “I knew. You couldn’t have wanted the water for evil.”

“How’d you do it?” Crowley shook his head. “Keep me safe like that? Shouldn’t have been possible but I felt it.”

“You already guessed I made it myself,” said Aziraphale with delight and just a hint of smugness that made Crowley’s traitor heart do funny things in his chest. “I asked for a bit extra. I suppose the Almighty must have been listening...”

An unspoken _for once_ swam beneath his words and Crowley’s playful smile trickled away. “Ohh,” he said, low-voiced, “that… I’m afraid that didn’t work.”

The angel snipped, “What? Of course it did.”

“Mm-nn-yeah. Sorry. Umm.” Nervous, he scratched at his cheek. “I think it… was… you? That did it.”

Aziraphale shot him a concerned, disbelieving look.

It wasn’t the grace of some higher power Crowley had felt over the years, begging him to stay, to think, wait a moment longer. He would have known the answer so much sooner if it had been. He’d have spit and hissed and railed against it. The indignity. How dare They try to care, he would have thought, after so long. How dare They ask anything of him when he wasn’t allowed to ask anything Before or since.

“Y-yeah.” He nodded to himself. “I’m sure of it, actually. It was always you, Aziraphale. Only you.”

Aziraphale’s eyes darted away. He was thinking. Processing at speeds incomprehensible to a mortal. There were a lot of implications for the angel in the revelation. A faith rocked and swayed in Crowley’s clever friend.

It would have been fascinating for Crowley to watch if it hadn’t meant suddenly choking again on his nerves.

Then Aziraphale straightened. “How can you be sure?”

_Oh, that would be telling._ “Well, what did you do? Exactly?”

It had been so long ago. Probably he hadn’t written out a whole speech nor memorised it either. But he surprised Crowley when he answered quickly with, “I suppose, in a way, it was a… confession?”

Crowley waited. No way he was pushing on that.

Aziraphale nodded. “Right. Yes. So, I’m realizing now this was terribly presumptive of me… I-I asked the Almighty to look into my heart and to yours. That-that probably was invasive. And I apologise immediately. I was so nervous and worried. That’s not to say I mean it as an excuse. You see, I cared deeply. Care! Present tense. I simply…”

He took a breath and Crowley encouraged him onward.

“I couldn’t imagine a world without you in it being worthwhile. We’d spent so long apart and it was always dreadfully dull then. You’ve always been the, uh, brightest spot in my life here? So if you were not… If you chose to leave it… Earth. Me. If you… Once you had the holy water, that is… Not that you should have done anything for my _convenience_ or _entertainment_ , that’s not what I was intending. I sound terribly selfish. See, this is what I meant.”

How Crowley loved him, the dithering fool.

“I _asked_ that She might help you, shall we say, pause to reconsider?”

Crowley tensed at the implication. At the truth of it only half guessed while staring down a locked safe with his heart broken and his world empty of meaning.

“Not for my sake but because you deserve happiness, dear. And yes, I suppose not unselfishly because I care for you. If you weren’t here because of something I gave you, I don’t think I… I don’t know what I would have done.”

Aziraphale had worried about Crowley’s request since the moment he handed over the holy water note. And though it pained Crowley to know that fear had never really left, more of him had clung to the fact that the angel trusted him.

Was a Divine Intervention card up his sleeve trust? Even though it hadn’t been the Almighty, the intention was there. But Aziraphale’s own love had been what spared Crowley, so… so nothing.

“I see,” he said, trying to keep a neutral tone.

Too late. Aziraphale had felt the shift. “Ohh. Crowley, you… I had no idea.”

_Shit. Fuck. Not what I want. Back up, back up._

Crowley was tired. And he didn’t know what any of it meant about them except that Aziraphale had done what he thought was needed. And because of that, they had averted Armageddon and were both still alive despite holy water and hellfire and Satan Himself.

“Look,” he said firmly, “it’s good. S’a long… It’s… Life’s tough, right? And what’re you supposed to think I wanted with it? I’m a demon, after all.”

“No! No, you’re so much more than that.”

“No, I am not.” Aziraphale went to argue but Crowley stopped him with a motion. “What I mean is: it’s not better or worse to be a _demon_ than an _angel_. I just… am. What I am. And whatever the Almighty’s plan is, there’s room for any of us to fuck it all up. Today showed that much,” he grumbled.

“Rather,” agreed Aziraphale, both of them clearly thinking about Beelzebub and Gabriel.

Crowley sighed. “I think I get it. Why you needed that bit extra. Insurance, yeah? Well, I am fairly certain you being--praying over it, for me, s-saved my life any number of times. That wasn’t God. They don’t give a fuck about me. You? Your pure intentions, whatever you want to call it. You did. Your… your love.”

The words hurt to say in the strangest way.

Hesitant, Aziraphale said, “Do you, uh, think that you _ever would have_ , if I hadn’t?”

“I can’t know. _Pleassse_ don’t ask.”

“Er, of course. Forgive me.”

Crowley twisted his lips. “It’s not like that.”

“No, Crowley. _Forgive me_. All of it. Please.”

There was a strain to his friend’s voice unfamiliar to the demon’s ears, one that grabbed the tendons of his neck and jerked him away, so full of sorrow were they. Incomprehensibly. That the angel would even think Crowley, of all beings, should be one to grant forgiveness to anyone let alone to-- _No. Stop it. That’s exactly the point, isn’t it?_

Crowley turned on the bed, facing Aziraphale on his knees. This was serious. Because Aziraphale seemed to be asking permission to… to feel. All of it.

_Don’t you see? You kept me safe. Both of us. We’re to stay that way. The world, too._

With the silence lingering and his somber expression, the angel’s anxiety spiked so hard Crowley could taste it. He didn’t need anything fancy to make this right, so he took those two soft hands in his own.

With all of his heart and whatever he had that passed for a soul, Crowley said, “Aziraphale. Angel of the Eastern Gate. My guardian. I forgive you.”

Aziraphale drew a ragged gasp, a trembling relief barely contained below the surface, eyes snapping closed. He swallowed, the slow bob of his throat drawing Crowley’s attention. “Thank you."

“Angel.”

Aziraphale opened his eyes. They were so watery. But then, so were Crowley’s own, weren’t they?

The synchronised click of their watches nearby counted out seconds as they gazed at each other, into each other. So far down the depths of golds, greens, and blues that they might never re-materialise under that weight, ancient and unbearable, tugging out their veins, measuring.

What words were enough? What would not burn their tongues? Children of eternity as they were, they both did what they had to, working within shit systems, with bosses who could hurt them and worse, they’d done all they could. At the core of it, they were both trying to protect the other one above themselves.

And they couldn’t have known, could they? Couldn’t know if something--some small glance out in the open--would come back sevenfold with gnashing teeth and shrieking accusation.

They weren’t yet free. It was like a chain around their necks tugging ever downward, that knowledge that said: this isn’t over. But for the night perhaps they could cling to the driftwood rafts of their own hearts while the waters rose outside.

Crowley blinked, slow and deliberate, choosing his path. He caught Aziraphale’s gaze shift, hummingbirdlike, those brows upturned in some anticipation, a shaky swallow of breath behind lips parted.

“Look,” Crowley started calmly, “I don’t want to presume-”

“Please do,” Aziraphale interrupted.

“W-what?”

A squeeze came to Crowley’s hand. Aziraphale licked bashful lips. “Presume,” said the angel. “Please.”

Crowley only stumbled over himself a little before setting to rights his wild fantasies. “Uhh, then... pucker up, I guess?”

Aziraphale smirked. “Ah, quite the seduction.”

Crowley chuckled, a soft sound. “Original tempter, me. Yep.”

The serpent sat back, feet tucked beneath him. He wished the moment could have been perfect. A grand sweeping romantic gesture worthy of the enormity of his love, birds flying overhead and Aziraphale swooning in his arms. But he supposed that was never either of their styles. Even his rushing to the rescue in the past had had Crowley shy once it was just him and his angel.

There would be no rushing in, running up to the glass of Aziraphale that separated them. No more begging him to come out and choose his heart. Choose Crowley. There was only this: two creatures, small in the cosmic scale of things, meeting in the quiet middle.

They had kissed in the past. When human social conventions so deemed it appropriate they had kissed on lips and cheeks and hands. And beyond the one on Aziraphale’s knuckles back in the study, if it had meant something more those times from one to the other, neither ever let on. But they had never kissed like they did then, cradled in a private sanctuary and far from the expectations of others. They had not kissed with well-manicured hands braced on boney knees to run along a lean-muscled thigh. They had not kissed with spindly fingers hovering and settling across a broad back, steady on, fighting not to pull those Heaven-bearing shoulders closer. Other kisses had not set their eyelashes brushing against one another, nor their hearts breath-held at their waking joy and skeptic to its longevity.

Was this to be another apple with fine print no one bothered to read?

Crowley decided he’d already damned the consequences and tasted deep the forbidden fruit of kissing Aziraphale.

_Aziraphale._

The angel’s lips claimed Crowley with every breath.

_Aziraphale._

Crowley threaded his fingers through downy curls, restraining the need to bury his fists into them.

_All those years._

They moved ever-closer, heart-aligned and cracked open. If the sun were pouring down on them, Crowley could not have felt warmer. He was a livewire of love. And Aziraphale was not burning from his touch. Nay, he came alive under it.

But all their soft moaning sighs came soaked in caution. It was a lot. Too much but not too fast.

Crowley broke the kiss, holding Aziraphale’s face between his palms. He searched for an answer--were they all right?--and his friend nodded. Chastely, Crowley pressed his lips to his angel’s, a promise.

They sat on the edge of Crowley’s bed, stocking feet dangling and shoulders untensing. The demon hooked one ankle around his friend’s to drag him closer. Aziraphale took his hand between them.

It had been nice to kiss Aziraphale, but Crowley could have done without all the nerve-exposed fraying bits. He felt entirely too tender.

They leaned, shoulder to shoulder, heads resting together.

“I know you don’t, my dear,” Aziraphale said, “but I _do believe_ someone is looking out for us.”

He placed a careful kiss on Crowley’s cheek, just beyond his serpentine brand.

“Angel,” Crowley said with an indulgent sigh, trying not to let on how that thought hurt, too. But it was a hurt like two hearts mending, stitched together side by side, hoping to heal stronger than their pain.

Whatever came their way, for good or for evil, they would face it together. They were choosing each other from then on and neither Heaven nor Hell would tear them apart. Of that, Crowley had so much more than faith.

-THE END-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there we have it. My first-started fic for the fandom, finally finished. Only took me 11 months, but there you go. It’s complete. I may ever decide to come back in and edit, but… that’s for another day.
> 
> I said "short epilogue to follow" and I WAS WRONG. That was not short. Hopefully that wasn't a problem. XD
> 
> I hope you enjoyed yourself on the way. Thanks for sticking with me on this angst trip. But especially thank you to N0nb1narydemon for inspiring this. If you have not read HOLY WATER, this is the link: <https://archiveofourown.org/works/19468345>
> 
> Things have been rough all around for everyone lately but please absolutely, I’d love to hear from you. <3


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